


A boy and his star.

by redundant



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Extended Metaphors, Fantasy, Fluff and Angst, High School, Humor, M/M, Math and Science Metaphors, actually a lot more, and a lot of confusion. let's go, and then not later on, than i thought i'd write lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-13 22:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17496752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redundant/pseuds/redundant
Summary: Bucky Barnes is in a math class, bored out of his skull, when he falls asleep and accidentally summons a star..Steve's the star, Bucky's the boy.





	1. a very strange enchanted boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which bucky trips twice and meets steve.

Bucky Barnes is in a math class, bored out of his skull, when he falls asleep and accidentally summons a star.

Not on purpose. Jesus. Even he wouldn’t do something that stupid, and he is _famous_ for his stupid ideas. (Examples include the Toilet Seat Fiasco of freshman year, the Great Rampage of junior year, and, his personal favourite, the Second Coming of Christ. It had been pretty impressive, and then it was revealed unto them that the so-called Son of God wasn’t, in fact, Christ, but Clint with a bearded glamour and a toga-poncho outfit that may have been a bedsheet in a bygone time. They’d been suspended three days that time. Clint pointed out the parallels between himself and one Jesus Christ, and then was suspended for four.)

Anyway. The point is that there have been a lot of stupid ideas. Bucky is not so far gone that he thinks a summons should join the list. It has been drilled into his head since he was capable of understanding language: summons are the magical equivalent of a backflip on a slippery poolside. Of wading into a shark tank whilst covered in chum. They’re the banana peel on the doorstep to Fucking Up And Getting Hurt.

But back to the math.

Bucky is not paying attention. He’s suspended in a half-world, the in-between in between desks and chairs and buzzing fluorescents, and the warm red insides of his eyelids. Barely anything is keeping him here, and conscious, except for the cold that bites his skin. (The AC broke back in March. Nobody’s fixed it yet.)

A pen clicks; a chair scrapes against the floor. Paper rustles. There’s the murmur of students doing trigonometry on a dark Friday afternoon. Letters swim into focus, harsh and alarming. Bucky’s eyes threaten to close again. A laugh in the corner of the room. Trig is a fucking joke, and he’s the punchline: a kid stuck in a standard gray plastic chair scribbling out the same symbols as classes and entire schools have before him, just another head in the batches of factory-issue kids being stamped out, dazed and blinking on conveyor belts as they are packed neatly into boxes and shipped out into the real world— which, he is pretty sure, _does not involve this much math_. It has more calculators, at least, because this isn’t two hundred years ago.

He looks around. People are scribbling away like their lives depend on it. (By people, he means Coulson and Maria. This may be inaccurate; he’s not sure if Coulson legally qualifies as a person.) Tony and Peggy are leaning back in their chairs, a couple desks away. They finished twenty minutes ago. Mr. Erskine either hasn’t noticed yet, or is just ignoring them because he doesn’t know what to do with them. They are difficult, though: Tony Stark started screwing around with differential equations when he was a toddler, probably, and Peggy Carter is— well. Terrifying.

But everyone apart from them seems to be struggling. All of these hands, moving through molasses air; all of these faces, screwed up in confusion. All of them, writing.

There are variations in the style, of course. Cautious, despondent, fuck-this-I-just-don’t-want-to-math. Wild scribbles and neat print. HB pencil and 0.75 ballpoint. Blue and black and green and ink charmed rainbow. But they are all writing. Tracing out the same symbols.

Bucky shifts forward; the movement is slow. Something is happening in the half-asleep soup of his brain. They are all writing the same thing, here and now, and the same thing as classes and grades and schools have before them. It’s been done so many times, it has to have had some kind of _meaning_. Some kind of effect.

Look: Bucky is surrounded by magic. It lives and breathes around him. It is in rebar and paved roads, it is protection spells and burglar alarms, it is in the spills from the potion factory off 53rd, it is in the weeds that grow from that toxic earth. It’s in medicine. In food. At home.

A picture: Bucky and his sister, cross-legged on the kitchen floor, rapt with attention as their mother makes dead flowers furl back to life and the wooden spoons dance. Another: his cousins, come home and barefoot, complaining about college, and dumping their textbooks on the table. Rolling their eyes and yammering on about lecturers and lessons and guys, while Bucky drifted over and leafed through theories of magic, explained with big words and complex diagrams that left him cross-eyed. Those books were old, dead things; all theory, dryer than a stale cracker, and just about as interesting. But there are parts of it that stuck.

Magic can be spoken, written, and willed. Runes are the backbone of the written. They’re the programming of a spell. The law of it, what it can and cannot achieve, laid down in languages so ancient they haven’t been spoken in centuries. Middle English. Old High Dutch. Sanskrit and Latin and Aramaic, and languages that are older still; ones almost extinct, and ones that actually are.

Maybe even math.

It gets Bucky to thinking. (He’s still staring at his very unfinished trig identities. He is also now at least half-awake.) Math has been churned out in vast, undefinable amounts, so that could maybe give it a little more— God, he doesn’t know— flexibility than other languages. A little more wiggle room. An elasticity, a plasticity, even in its stone-cold hardness of fact, the way stiff dough eases up when you knead it.

He’s read before that when you get down to it, it’s not the programming or language or technical skill that makes a spell work. It’s the gut feeling of sheer desperation: the feeling of _knowing_ it will work, absolutely and completely, even if the knowing’s the size of a grain of sand. It’s intention, visceral and crude, that counts, not technique.

Maybe, Bucky thinks, maybe magic isn’t just a question of quality, but quantity. Maybe it can be as simple as that. With something that feels both plastic and flexible, something as large-scale as this, it could work.

 _What could work?_ something small asks.

He has no idea where the fuck these thoughts are coming from. They slip into his head and burn through his neurons like wildfire. Big spells. A strange fervour suffuses the air, born of the almost-storm outside, and the injustice of trig identities after lunch on a Friday. The amount of synapses in this room that are being pushed to their limit— _look_ , he thinks, _maybe_ , he thinks, _there is something to this_.

His bones buzz. It’s not like anything he’s felt before, and it’s a little bit of everything. One part pins and needles, one part unwanted boner, one part adrenalin, but the strangest part is that his mind is clear. Calm. There’s just the heartbeat that thunders soft and heavy in his ears.

They are all still writing.

Bucky is not.

His pencil hovers over the page, stuck on the left-hand side of the identity. He’s building a bridge, from one side of a chasm to another, and he balances on sticks and stones. Not one brick, or cement mixer, or rebar, or planks, or any of the shit you need to build a bridge: none of it’s there. If it is, he can’t see it. God. Is the equal sign not enough? Can he not take it as fact that one side is the other?

A warmth envelops him; he is too tired to even yawn.

And so Bucky closes his eyes, and falls asleep thinking about magic and numbers and going from one side to the other.

.

This is the stupid part.

.

The ticker tape of his thoughts slowly unwinds, spools in the back of his brain. It floats in his cerebral fluid. It dissolves, rendering words the consistency of overcooked pasta.

But the calm, from before, narrows down to a knife-point. Here it is. It floats above his head, invisible. It disturbs the air around it as a whirlpool would, or a hurricane, and it is the storm’s eye, and it is his eye, and the almost-storm outside the window is the storm here is the storm somewhere else, and now his thoughts really are spaghetti: they loop and whorl like fingerprints, like the hurricane knife-point only he can see.

Bucky, not even sure he’s doing anything, takes the point and slowly guides it through the air. It tugs at his gut, at the iron in his blood that follows like filings to a magnet. He guides it through the air. The pain sharpens, but it’s a good hurt, stretching a sore muscle.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Contract. Expand. The point moves, and moves, and he watches its arc as it glides through the heavy air, and then it hits a snag and the whirlpool-waves go frantic.

The thin thread connecting him to whatever this is nearly snaps—

(Breathe in. Breathe out. Close your eyes.)

—and then it doesn’t.

So he continues, eyes closed. He pushes the sharpness against the snag until it is sure. He pushes down, and darkness rushes into him, fills his lungs and bones and blood like helium in a balloon.

His throat tightens. His eyes are hot. It’s—

God, he doesn’t know if there are words for this, but the closest one would be— what, longing?

Distance?

He is suddenly, crushingly, hyper-aware of this vast _distance_ , millions and millions of miles of it.

A chasm.

Bucky is on one side, and something else is on the other. And he knows that this thing on the other side feels what he does, too.

It’s immense. Silent. He is

full up with the aching dark, burning mercurial, hot and cold, and—

and he knows that whatever it is that’s out there, if it had a throat it would close up; if it had eyes they would sting with tears; if it had a voice it would be silent, because this yearning is too much for sound.

 _I am here_ , the hurt says, _and you are there_.

It is the thing’s hurt. It is his too.

 _I miss you_.

It is quiet.

One side of the equation to the other.

What can he do? He:

looks down at his worksheet and realises the page is crowded with scribbles, over cosx and cotx and all the rest of it, writhing on the paper;

realises that he has solved question eight;

takes the point and pushes down as hard as he can until

something

folds.

And then he’s falling through styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap and somebody is kicking his chair and whispering hot in his ear and then he is falling for real, his chair is tipping back -

Bucky jerks awake. He goes from 45 degrees from horizontal to a good, balanced 90 before he realises what’s happening, and turns to the desk next to him.

“The fuck,” he hisses at Clint, whose hand is on the back of his chair. “Are you trying to break my head?”

“Erskine was gonna do it if I didn’t,” Clint hisses right back. “You’re welcome.”

Bucky’s head is still dizzy, trying to grasp the fact that it is not smashed open on the floor right now. It sends signals to his hands to grip the edge of the desk until his knuckles are whiter than Wonder Bread. He forces himself to relax, to loosen his shoulders. _What the fuck_ , he thinks, and looks down at his page. It is a normal math worksheet, completely free of potentially Satanic scribblings. Question eight is still blank. A strange queasiness churns in his gut. His heart pounds. His eyes are dry and dull. _What the fuck_ , he thinks again. His surroundings are coming back to him. He’s starting to feel even stupider than usual. But Clint’s just said something, and he needs to respond.

“Thank you,” he says, as scathingly as he can manage. This is not much.

Clint side-eyes him. “How much sleep did you get?”

“Funny.” It is not. Bucky shifts in his chair. “Uh. Was anything - was anything weird just now?”

“Apart from you?”

Bucky makes a face, flips him off.

“I don’t know,” Clint shrugs, returning to his work, “ask Coulson.”

Bucky leans forward, taps him on the shoulder. Coulson jerks violently, like he’s on the wrong end of a fork stuck into a socket. His eyes are wide as he turns to face him. “Hey,” says Bucky. Coulson looks even more terrified. Bucky ignores this. “Anything seem kinda weird to you just now?”

“Uh,” squeaks Coulson.

“Like the weather, or whatever,” Bucky presses.

“Uh.”

It is clear, after five more seconds, that Coulson is not going to say anything further, prompted or un. “Never mind,” says Bucky, and turns to Maria on his other side. She looks at him with an expression he can’t quite place. “I kind of zoned out for a bit,” he explains, and she rearranges her features into a gracious smile.

“You stuck on question eight?”

He is. She explains it to him. Clint works steadily beside him, because despite what he likes people to think, he’s a giant nerd and the third-best person at math in the classroom. The lesson drags on, like every other, until the bell rings and Bucky’s shoving everything into his bag and slinging it over his shoulder and slipping into the sudden mass of students pouring out the door. He’s narrowed down the weird experience to hallucinogens, or— or something. Did he get roofied? Is this what roofies feel like? He still feels oddly disconnected, like he’s watching himself on a screen, as he makes his way down the stairs with Clint and goes to the canteen to buy a lunch he’ll spend more time pushing around on the tray than eating. It’s all bizarrely normal.

And so it is that Bucky puts the experience down to hormones and hallucinogens, or something, and tries to move on.

.

The thing is. While this explanation would be convenient, it would fail to explain Steve.

.

Come to think of it, a lot of things would be more convenient if they didn’t have to explain Steve.

.

Traffic. Birds picking at trash. Air hot with sun. Everything is in that weird sort of limbo that comes with bright and cloudy days. People yell at each other, the noise drifting from open windows into the humid air past his earphones and into his ears; it’s a normal walk back home. Bucky’s shoes scuff the pavement. He watches his laces flap loose like tongues.

Here’s a thing about Bucky: his shoelaces keep coming undone. People tell him to tie them or he’ll break his head, and yeah, okay, point, but _still_. Why is he the one that gets blamed? Why not his damn sneakers, or the laces themselves, that’s what he’d like to know. He doesn’t know why they’re like this; he just sees how quick they are to untie themselves. How easily they slip. How easily he stumbles over his untied laces. How quickly he approaches horizontal, and how his arms wave like idiot windmills trying to amend this. He almost lands flat on his face—

but he _doesn’t_ , because there is a wall of person in front of him that smells like too much Axe. It grunts, “Watch the fuck out.”

“Sorry, man.” Bucky backs up quick and red-faced, anxious, but the guy doesn’t make a thing out of it. He throws a quick glance over his shoulder, and pushes past Bucky for the opposite direction, muttering something under his breath.

“O-kay,” Bucky says to himself.

He bends down to triple-knot his shoelaces and comes up, makes to put his earphones back in, when he hears the noise. Rather, the series of noises. There’s a few. Trash cans clattering. Laughter that floats sharp and silver out the mouth of the alley just a few yards away. Another round on the trash cans, like someone kicked over a pair of cymbals— hell, with the grunts that are coming, it’s like someone’s curbstomping the entire marching band and enjoying every minute of it.

Bucky doesn’t like that. He yanks his earphones out for good, and scowls, and wonders whether he’s really going to step into some dark alley to make sure nobody’s dying.

It’s not dark, though. It’s 3.16 on a May afternoon, and everything shines with an almost-summer hopefulness, even the faded graffiti on the old brick walls. Nothing bad could be happening on an afternoon like this. Not so close to school. Nobody would be that stupid.

 _Don’t be stupid_.

His feet keep taking him closer.

 _Don’t be stupid, Bucky_.

And closer still.

_Bucky._

His feet drag him, step after step, to the alley’s opening maw, and then right past it. Bucky keeps walking. He breathes out. He focuses hard on a swishing sensation by his feet, and looks down to see that his shoelaces are untied again.

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Bucky says aloud, and stoops down again to tie them.

The sounds press into his ears, and his hands slip on his laces a couple times because _Jesus_. Okay. Okay. He could just go back home and not get beat up. But he also, and this is the stupid part, cannot in good faith leave this place without at least knowing for sure that this is just a fight between a couple of riled-up cats, and not a mugging.

Another round on the trashcans.

If it was stupid to summon a star, it is stupider still to walk into the alley.

He hesitates. He has nothing to guard himself with, and then he sees it: a leaf, skittering across the ground.

Winifred Barnes, Responsible Mother, hadn’t raised a fool. Life begets life, she had told him in the kitchen repeatedly, and so a leaf that once lived is more likely to protect you than a stone. Bucky had scoffed— yeah, okay, paper beats rock but come _on_ — but then his mom pointed out, gently, that wands were made of wood for a reason, and that if he wanted to get himself killed he was more than welcome to try. He’d shut up long enough to catch the words she’d said.

He repeats them now. Murmurs over sap and broken leaf, wills it a shield and protector of life. A sort of warmth spreads over him. The charm should hold.

Another crash in the alley. _Cat_ , he reassures himself, and walks right in.

It is not a cat.

It is a couple of guys, who are made primarily of shoulders and muscle. Guys who hulk and skulk in the shadows like it’s an Olympic sport, and who are also apparently going for gold in Menacing Glares. They’re standing over something. A crumpled unmoving something about the size of his sister— Bucky’s heart stammers, and then resumes when the thing stirs and pushes itself onto its knees.

“I could do this all damn day,” the boy-thing spits.

“Aw, shut up,” says Big Guy #1. “Hey. Make him shut up.”

Big Guy #2 does not speak but makes to turn and probably kick the kid in the face, which just seems a little much. He’s already got a black eye and a split lip.

Now, if this were a movie, Bucky would step forward and say something like _Easy there, boys_ , or something equally collected and suave. His voice would be steady. He would also look closer to twenty, not have a zit on his chin, and generally have more going for him in the muscles department. As it is, his knees are locked and his legs are shaking and there’s a chance he might actually piss himself.

But Bucky is currently floating outside his body. And he watches it step forward, and he notes, quite detached, that it has the self-preservation of an expired peach. “Whoa,” he says idiotically. “What’s going on?”

This is when Big Guy #2 makes good on the kick, and Not Your Buddy is down again, rattling the trash cans. He then turns. “Beat it,” he says to Bucky.

“You’re asking for it,” Not Your Buddy slurs from amongst the garbage. He sways to his knees, and then to his feet.

“You just walk away now, and forget all of this,” Big Guy #1 says. “Both of you. Come on now.”

Bucky hesitates, and clutches the leaf tighter. “Hey,” he says to the guy. “You could— we can go. Just get out of here.”

Not Your Buddy turns to him and says, “You leave. I’m finishing this.” He looks, under the grime and blood, to be around Bucky’s age.

Their eyes meet.

And Bucky, who has been floating outside of himself for the past while, slams back down into his body and blinks rapidly.

Everything feels super-charged. He can feel the air move against his skin. The guy’s eyes are very, very blue. But Bucky’s got more pressing issues to focus on. “You’ll be finished soon enough if we don’t leave.”

Not Your Buddy hauls himself higher. “Why don’t you go, then.”

“Come on,” Bucky pleads, maybe coaxes, he doesn’t know, doesn’t know anything except this dumbass is digging himself deeper. The two big guys are watching, amused. “Could you just—”

“Get out of here,” Not Your Buddy commands him.

“Finally, talking some sense,” Big Guy #1 says. “Listen to your little friend here, and leave.”

Bucky breathes in, then out. His fist is frozen tight.

“No,” he says.

Seconds drag by, taking Bucky with them, further and further from that last word. Not Your Buddy just looks at him. “Suit yourself,” he says at last. “Might wanna step back, though.”

“Step back?” Big Guy #1 hoots. “ _Step back_?”

“Show us what you got,” Big Guy #2 says.

Not Your Buddy stares, unimpressed. “I’m a star.”

Big Guy #1 snorts. “Sure you are.”

“But I am.” And his skin starts to glow with a soft light, like a hand held over a torch.

“What, like in the movies?” asks Big Guy #2.

There’s silver leaking out of Not Your Buddy; he shines against the Dumpster, the graffiti, the crumbling brick. It might be a trick of the eye, but the guys seem to shrink back into the shadows.

“Human torch,” Big Guy #1 dismisses. “Big deal. See ‘em on every street.”

“I’m a _star_ ,” Not Your Buddy repeats, like they’re all stupid, like star doesn’t mean— like it means—

There’s a sharp, fried-circuit smell in the air now. The storm presses down heavy and humid. The light brightens with every passing second. Now the black eye is a smudge, the split lip gone.

“Hey, quit it,” Big Guy #2 says nervously.

Not Your Buddy fixes them with a white-hot glare. “You asked for it,” he says, and crackling light bursts out of him like a goddamn freight train, and Bucky is blinded; he raises a hand to shield his eyes, and he thinks he hears a scream. And then somehow, even safe in the darkness behind his eyelids, something splits and the light roars through, and then everything

goes

nova.

.

When the light dims back to acceptable levels, and Bucky can sort of see through the sunspots, it’s just Not Your Buddy standing in the alley. Big Guys #1 and #2 are gone.

“Did they, uh.” Bucky gestures. “Did you.”

“Don’t worry, they ran off,” Not Your Buddy says.

“Good,” Bucky says hoarsely. “Good.” They stand in silence for a moment. It has started to rain. The cold, sharp drops bring Bucky back down from wherever the hell his head floated off, but he’s still jarred when he blurts out, “That was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Not Your Buddy blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Why’d you wait so long to do-” another gesture— “that? And the hell were you doing, getting into a fight?”

“What are you, my mom?”

If Bucky dies today, it will be on this hill. “It was dumb, alright?”

“It wasn’t your fight,” Not Your Buddy snaps.

“Did you _want_ to get your face kicked in?”

“Do you _want_ to shut the fuck up?”

Bucky does not. “Why’d you wait so long?”

Not Your Buddy glares at him. He seems to be doing that a lot. “Wanted to give them a fair chance.”

“You’re crazy,” Bucky says emphatically.

“I had it handled.”

“Uh, no. I don’t think so.”

“Drop it, okay? You don’t even know me.”

Something seizes Bucky then, some boldness he didn’t know he had. “What’s your name?”

A pause. A confused stare. The rain clatters down around them. “What?”

“You’re right, I don’t know you. Your name would be a start.” He sticks out a hand. “I’m Bucky.”

There will be time, later, in which they figure it out. But for now, the star stares at Bucky, hair dripping into his flinty eyes. He takes Bucky’s hand and says, “Steve,” and then he vanishes and Bucky is left with a heap of crumpled clothes on the ground in front of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw)


	2. make yourself comfortable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which steve is an asshole, and then misunderstood, and then a friend.

Bucky sort of stands there in a daze before something snaps and he realises it is raining, and he should also really get back home. He uses his hoodie as an umbrella and only bumps into three things on the way back: a lamppost, a garbage can, and a person who glares at him, though he barely notices.

There are many thoughts he could be having now. They all seem kind of quiet, though, and the only one speaking up is _what the fuck was that?_ , which is a fair question. Bucky’s ears are still kind of ringing from when Steve— yeah. That. And there’s a thought: will he ever see him again?

It takes a while— and not a very long while— before Bucky finds Steve again, shivering, rain-soaked, completely naked, by his front door.

“What—”

“It happens sometimes,” Steve snaps. He draws his arms tighter around himself. He’s holding the welcome mat in front of his crotch.

“Okay,” says Bucky, and then, because it has been a very long day, “um,” and then his mom comes out and sees the both of them and within ten minutes they’re on the subway to the hospital and Steve is fully dressed, no questions asked.

They discover at the hospital that Steve is a star. They also discover that the body he inhabits when he’s on Earth has, in addition to the split lip and black eye, four cracked ribs, and so the nice hospital people rush Steve the Star to some department somewhere to get something done, Bucky doesn’t know, because he is suddenly exhausted and nauseous and has to put his head between his knees in the waiting area. “It’s okay,” Bucky’s mom says, as the world lurches unsteadily before him, and pats his back; “it’s okay.”

.

It is not okay for a while.

Short version: Bucky throws up. A couple of nurses rush towards him and then everything goes pleasantly fuzzy until he wakes up in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms. It turns out that summoning a star (“Jesus _Christ_ ,” says his mother from his bedside) takes a lot out of a guy. Bucky will need a lot of rest. Bucky will need to stay at home. Bucky will be missing the next three days of school, and will effectively be having a five-day weekend. “Hell yeah,” he says, and the doctor smiles briefly at him.

“You’re recovering quickly so far, I have to say,” she says. “And that was quite a feat of magic.”

“Oh,” Bucky says. “Uh. Thank you.”

“A summons,” 

“Mr. Rogers requires around the same amount of time to heal up. He’ll be staying with us…”

The doctor keeps talking. Bucky’s attention drifts over to the bed next to him, where Steve is propped up and bandaged

Steve looks briefly, wildly uncertain. It’s just a second, but it’s enough. Bucky’s mind is made up.

“Mom,” says Bucky. He tugs at her sleeve like a little kid, and gestures to Steve with his chin, and she nods.

“He can stay with us,” she declares.

The doctor shuffles her papers. “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Barnes, but I—”

“He’ll stay with us.”

And so he does. 

.

“So what’s space like?” Bucky asks through a mouthful of tomato rice.

“Big,” Steve says shortly. His spoon clinks against the plate.

The ride home was awkward. It was Steve pressed up against Bucky pressed up against his mom’s handbag, jostling every time the subway lurched. (You’d think with magic, the government would be able to charm a smoother ride, but no. Not enough funding.) Bucky had been pretty spaced out. A side effect of being in a hospital, sure, but Bucky’s still dizzy every time he looks at Steve and realises he summoned him. Actually, honest to God _summoned_ him. What the hell is he supposed to do with that, he would like to know. And all the while Bucky’s mom oscillated between silence and buzzing over Steve and berating Bucky, silently, for doing such a stupid thing, what the _hell_ was he thinking. And Bucky stared back, and tried to silently say, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, okay? Because I wasn’t thinking. And I would also like someone to explain to me what I did. And Steve just stares suspiciously at everything around him like he’s waiting for it to jump him.

So.

Here they are, at the dinner table. There’s salad and beans and tomato rice. It’s warm, except for the salad. All of it is good. The placemats have gone to hell and come back, by the look of them, but they’ve got the nice plates out and it would be fine, wonderful even, if it weren’t for the glares being shot at Bucky every five seconds.

Bucky is more or less used to the whole summoning thing now. He’s at least comfortable enough to sit in the same room as it. He is also getting used to the fact that Steve Rogers is a dick. Bucky is being _nice._ He pulled Steve’s chair out for him, and poured him a glass of water, and Steve had muttered something like, “I don’t need your help,” but Bucky couldn’t quite make it out because Steve has a habit of looking down and talking into his collarbone whenever he’s around.

He’s doing fine with Becka, though. He actually smiles at her when she fires questions at him, one after the other, like she’s never going to run out of them.

“Do other stars talk?” asks Becka.

“Sort of,” Steve says. “We don’t talk like you do, like humans, but we communicate. Through light, sort of. Through waves.”

Becka is nodding. “Do you like being down here?”

“Yeah, I guess—”

“Do you have a star girlfriend?”

Steve chokes, goes red as the tomato rice. He drops his spoon. Bucky, because he is nice, swoops down quickly and charms it clean and hands it back to Steve.

“I could have done it,” Steve says. Because of course he does.

“Do you miss your star girlfriend?”

Steve turns to face the kitchen and says, “Mrs. Barnes, ma’am, these beans are delicious.”

Bucky gapes openly as his ma clucks and coos over Steve for the rest of the night like he is a precious little bluebird. If Steve is any bird, he thinks furiously over Scrabble, he’s a pigeon. A foul-mouthed, bitchy New York pigeon who gets into fights and doesn’t back down, not even if it nearly kills him.

Still. Bucky is a big boy; he can deal with being a little annoyed. And he does, and he manages it well all throughout dinner and Scrabble and homework, up until teeth have been brushed and _goodnight_ s have been said and he is this close to snapping like a rubber band.

It’s late. Steve’s still fuming like an unchecked pot on the stove. He’s in Bucky’s bed, and Bucky is on a mattress on the floor.

He shifts, keeps an arm halfway over his eyes, tries to sleep. He can _feel_ Steve boiling away under the bedsheets, his face all scrunched up in constant disapproval— it’s got to be uncomfortable. There’s no way it couldn’t be. Bucky tosses and turns and tosses and turns. A ship on stormy waves. Maybe he is the waves themselves. It’s warm. It’s been a long day. Bucky’s room is almost dark. Thin strips of city light slice through the shutters. Sounds of traffic float in, distant, and stick on the worn-out muffling charms that line the windowsills. The relative silence presses painful and close; the air is sweaty, dark. And time stretches out so long and strange, so taffy-like, and Bucky gets so close to the edge of sleep, that familiar ledge between dreaming and wakefulness, that he tastes it on his teeth—

But the wind is cold on his ankles, and it drags him back firmly into Awake. Annoyed, he cracks an eye open. His blankets are rucked up around his knees, and the window is ajar, and who should be there but Steve, hovering like a guilty balloon.

“What are you doing?” Bucky asks stupidly.

Steve lets him know just how stupidly with his face. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“It’s a bit late for that.”

They stay there for a few moments, Steve’s pale bare feet just brushing the ground.

“So, what, are you running away?”

“You’re sharp,” Steve mutters. He rises up a little more, shoots Bucky a defiant stare. _So what_ , says the look. _You gonna do anything about it?_ And he turns to the window and makes to leave.

Bucky tries to jigsaw his tired words into a sentence that will work. “You know, you can stay,” he calls out.

Steve’s hand pauses on the sill. “Oh,” he says.

“What makes you think you can’t?”

It’s dark, and Steve is at once moon-bright and silhouetted, but Bucky thinks he sees his ears flush. “Don’t want to impose.”

Bucky scoffs, “Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” says Steve, who is halfway out the twelfth-floor window. Bucky has to laugh at that. Steve scooches back in— probably messing up the muffling charms, and yeah, some more traffic is leaking in, Bucky’s going to have to go over them later— and pads back to the bed on quiet feet. He sits perched on the edge, unsure. “I— sorry.”

“You sorry?” Bucky mimics.

Steve’s eyes flash bright. “Shut up.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says, and means it. “Just— you? Saying sorry? Goddamn. Who are you and what’d you do with Steve?”

“Ha ha.”

“You don’t,” Bucky begins. He’s still having trouble with the jigsaw. “You don’t have to be sorry for anything.”

Someone, somewhere, is playing a piano. The noise drifts in. It should be ridiculous, or feel a little surreal, but it doesn’t. Steve’s eyes are trained right on his. Bucky feels, again, that peculiar sort of in-his-body-ness; like he is pulled into every atom of his own self. Like he exists here and nowhere else.

And then Steve’s eyes flicker down to the bit of mattress next to Bucky’s left knee. “I thought you didn’t like me,” he says, voice light but measured.

“What makes you think that?” Bucky asks, indignant.

Steve actually looks up at him in disbelief.

Introspection is a wonderful gift, should one have it, but Bucky has left his in its wrapping and shoved it into some dark, musty cabinet in the back of his head. He takes it out now and reviews the past twenty-four hours or so.

“Oh,” he says. “I can— yeah, I can see that.” Now it’s his turn for his face to flush, and he sort of screws it up and puts it in his hands. “God. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Steve says.

More silence. They are very good at the silence.

“Can I ask you something?” Bucky blurts. He doesn’t wait for a response. “Why did you get into that fight?”

“Why did you get me out of it?”

Bucky is starting to realise why he doesn’t get the introspection out so much. There’s like five layers of tape and sixteen of bubble wrap and it’s a bit of a bitch to get off. “I couldn’t leave you there,” he tries. He hopes it’s true.

Steve remains a living rock. Then he says to his knees, voice flat, “I’ve been here before. Earth isn’t completely new to me. And when I landed, I saw this guy and this girl. He had a buddy with him. And they had her backed up into a wall and she was crying out for help. She wanted him to stop. I stopped him.” Bucky feels about three inches tall now. “I thought,” Steve continues, still not looking at him, “that there was a reason I got here. I thought she might have needed me, and I just wanted to help.” Two inches now. One. Bucky shrinks with every passing second. “You know, not one other person was trying to stop that guy.”

“I’ve been an asshole,” Bucky says.

“Don’t—”

“No,” Bucky continues, “I have been. I’m sorry.” He takes a breath. ”You know that— the thing that happened when I summoned you?”

Steve sits on the edge of his bed, luminous and shadowed, and he looks at Bucky.

“There was that feeling,” Bucky says. “It just felt so— it was so big.” It scared him. It scares him, now, in his own bedroom, which is full up with dark and reeks of it. “I don’t know what it was. But it felt. It— you were so far from home, and you were all alone, like completely alone, and I saw you and I couldn’t just leave you there.”

Steve says nothing, just keeps looking. But his face says something that aches in Bucky’s chest. And he is carved from light and space and the awful, terrible knowledge of the loneliness. Of the chasm that both of them carry. And it’s in Bucky’s chest now and Steve’s, and it grinds heavy against their ribs, pushes right into their hearts.

They are in the exact same place, but closer now, somehow.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Bucky whispers. The hurt is lodged on his throat. It makes it difficult to speak. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Steve says.

It is everywhere. His hair, his eyelashes, are the dark. The shadows cast by his knees, his legs, his torso. Bucky writhes with the dark. It creeps forward to meet his feet, like waves. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I.” His eyes sting with stupid tears. “I. I made you feel it.”

Steve comes a little closer. “Bucky,” he says gently. He places a hand on his shoulder. “I’m okay.”

Bucky looks up at him, and Steve is luminous, against the dark

which ebbs back, it shrinks back, back into whatever

it came from. And he is the light, Steve is: he

is the 

light.

They

remain

in silence so full it chokes him. Bucky’s heart is heavy. But in the center of the black hole is the light. And there is Steve, and the world tilts away so gently he’s almost not sure he is asleep until he sees the insides of his eyelids, warm and red, and he flies through the light into the atmosphere, into space, where he looks at the stars till his eyes burn with them. And he turns to see Steve’s face, next to his, and Bucky holds tight to his hand and asks, _Will you stay?_ and Steve says,

 _yes_.

.

Bucky does wake up, eventually.

He looks over at his empty bed and his heart races enough to get him into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and scrubbing at his hair and saying, “Mom—”

Steve is leaning against the kitchen sink. Leaning. Casually. _Him_. He holds a chipped pink mug between his hands. Becka’s on the counter getting Steve Ovaltine, because she likes clambering up to the high cupboards.

Bucky blinks. “Hi there,” he says.

Becka says, primly, “Good morning. As you may have noticed, we have a guest.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, “he’s staying in my room.”

She pushes herself down to the floor, then cuts her eyes over to him pointedly. “Ahem.”

“What?”

“Look in a mirror. You’ll see.”

It’s too early for this. Bucky turns to Steve, who is determinedly not smiling into his mug. “You’re still here, I see,” he says.

“Yeah,” Steve says. When he looks up, his eyes are sort of crinkled at the edges. “Why, is that a problem?”

“Not at all,” Bucky says.

“Go have a shower,” Becka hisses, and he laughs.

He thinks of dreams and space and stars while hot water runs over him. He wonders if Steve had the same dream he did. It felt like he was there. When he gets back, Steve is at the dining table, examining a silver, pulsing light under the skin of his wrist. He turns to Bucky. “This means I have to go, usually,” he says apologetically. The Ovaltine is only half-finished.

“Damn,” Bucky says. He forces a smile. “Come back soon.”

“I’ll try to.”

“And don’t run away next time,” Bucky says.

Steve takes a long, long sip, and sets the empty mug down, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He grins at Steve. “I’ll be back.”

“You’d better be,” Bucky half-threatens, but his smile is easy as the light pulses faster and then Steve is gone, and all that’s left is a pile of Bucky’s clothes on the chair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhkDnZo2EAM)
> 
> if you liked this, or even if you didn't, let me know
> 
> kudos/comments give me life etc
> 
> have a good day :)


	3. soup bang nip cat polly mitcha cameo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which steve is a friend.

They meet a few more times.

Outside Bucky’s house. On the subway. (Nobody blinks an eye at the naked boy who is suddenly very much _there_. Bucky has never been more grateful for New York.) Outside school.

That last one is— well. Suffice it to say, there are sights that one expects at a school, and an ass-naked starboy glowing like a sunrise is not one of them.

“Oh, God,” Bucky says, and shuts his eyes, and shoves his balled-up hoodie at Steve. “God. I didn’t need to see that.”

“Shut up,” Steve says, but he takes the hoodie.

They rush to a bathroom nearby. Bucky tries not to think about where his hoodie is going; he fails spectacularly. “Uh,” he says, trying to distract himself. “You, uh. You came back.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool.”

This is not how he thought this conversation would go.

They’re in the bathroom. A wide-eyed tiny freshman walks out, openly not staring at Steve, who does a good job of ignoring him. “I guess,” Steve says, with a raised eyebrow. Apparently this conversation is not to his liking, either. He looks around with interest. His light bounces off the mirrors, makes the place look underwater. “What is this place?”

Bucky doesn’t know how to explain public bathrooms, and doesn’t really want to right now, so he shoves Steve into a cubicle and says, “Don’t touch anything. I’ll get you some clothes and I’ll be back.” He leaves Steve there. He makes for the Phys Ed office. He turns around at the bathroom door, sees Steve bewildered and shining against the orange cubicle door. It may be the light, but that image burns right into his brain. “Don’t touch anything,” Bucky warns him again. “And, uh. Close that door.”

It takes some red-faced stuttering but Bucky gets an XS PE shirt and pants— no underwear, but he’s not going there— and he races back to the bathroom and hopes nobody has eaten Steve alive, or something. He shoves the clothes under the cubicle door. Steve steps out eventually. He is looking with interest at his own right wrist, at a silver light pulsing there. “They’re calling me back, I think,” he says, as close to apologetic as he can get.

Bucky blinks. “What?”

“This thing.” Steve raises his wrist. “They tell me when to come and go.”

“Who does?”

Steve shrugs. “My mom, sometimes. And— what do you call them— probation officers.”

Bucky blinks again. “You— what? Probation?”

“Nice seeing you again,” Steve says, and waves, and disappears. The PE kit falls to the ground and starts to soak up the wet on the floor.

.

“I really wanted to come back,” Steve says earnestly, the very next time that they meet. “Really really did. Begged my ma, but she wouldn’t budge. Found out about me almost drowning and nearly nova’d out.”

“Nova?”

Steve waves a hand. “Collapsing in on herself,” he says breezily. “Catastrophic explosion, ejecting most of her mass. You know. She settled for a buncha solar flares and yelling at me till all her planets started complaining.” Bucky’s head is spinning. “She likes you, though. Says you’re a nice, sensible boy.”

Bucky, sensibly and nicely, starts keeping a spare change of clothes in his bag. Just in case.

It comes in useful the next time they meet, two weeks later. And the time after that, three weeks later. And the time after that— you get the idea.

Steve becomes increasingly foul-mouthed and curious about the world around him. Bucky tries to explain things like the subway and lampposts and government subsidies, and does a pretty okay job, and then Steve starts asking him about magic, and he does a less okay job, because he doesn’t entirely understand it himself.

So he shows him. Makes strings of lights trail from his fingertips. Turns Steve’s hair blue and his eyes blond. Gives Becka bunny ears. Little things, things that even kids can do. He makes glass vanish from a window and reappear. He turns an apple into a tree. He turns it back into an apple, quickly, and tries to put the living room back in order.

And Steve comes back, again and again.

.

Bucky gets used to the strange dreams.

It comes with magic, he is told; a side effect. The small text. The voiceover at the end of the commercial. If someone had told him just as he was about to summon Steve for the first time— _hey, kid, you should watch out for_ — he probably wouldn’t have changed his decision, but still. It would have been nice to know.

They’re strange, dark dreams. Stars flaring over desert plains, over earth scorched dry. And things lurk in the shadows between galaxies. They slither into the cracks in the soil. He calls them _things_ because language doesn’t have names for them. No language he knows, anyway.

He sits there and keeps his eyes shut and waits till dawn comes.

.

“You’re in trouble,” Bucky asks Steve the next time he sees him.

It’s dark. It’s almost evening. They are in a park, on a swing set. A group of kids a little younger than Bucky, maybe by a year or two, are gathered under a tree a few yards away. Something glasslike glints in the scant light, and laughter dances over. Steve’s eyes keep flickering back to their shadows, to the lighting charm they’ve strung up to a branch. “Sort of,” he says.

“The hell does that mean?”

“I got curious, I guess.”

“Curious.”

“About life down here.”

The first few stars are beginning to show in the sky. “What happened?”

Steve looks at him. “I’ll tell you another time,” he says, kind of gently, “I might have to go back soon.”

“Okay,” says Bucky, “fair.” They wait. A few more stars come out. Steve is not looking at them. He’s looking at the grass, at the swing set, at the everything else around them. “But if you got in trouble for coming down here, why’d they send you back as punishment?”

“They have to.”

“Oh, yeah?” “You summoned me, remember?” Bucky does. “Yeah. Well. I’ve got to come here sometimes, or space will rend itself to pieces, or whatever.” Steve’s voice is as close to a shrug as voices can get

“They try to make it as short as they can manage,” and here, his eyes become white, the same way as clouds on a hot bright day.

“That’s shitty of them.”

“I hate them,” Steve says. His voice is low. “I—”

He doesn’t get to finish. The night swallows him whole.

.

Steve leaves a lot, and much quicker than Bucky would like, but he also stays over a few times. It gets to the point that Bucky starts keeping a spare toothbrush in the mug, and he cleans out under his bed so he can keep the roll-out mattress there. They meet in roads and alleys and places Bucky has never been. In dreams, sometimes. And other times he thinks he sees flashes of Steve, flickering briefly in and out of space. His pale skin, his blond hair, his eyes, staring right at Bucky. His mouth, opening around words snatched from Bucky’s ears.

.

Traffic noises, rising into the air like some great big honking bird, all the way to the clouds. The leaves are starting to turn orange. Some idiot’s charmed a couple trees purple, too, fifty yards over. Bucky presses himself against the wall against the swarm of children and looks at it and sighs.

He has had nicer days. It’s a low bar, in some ways, what with all the kids stomping on his toes, and his backpack fit to burst with advanced Arithmancy worksheets. _Calculate the intersection points between shapes A and B on the liminal and Dandridge planes._ He misses the days when all he had to care about was how many watermelons Timmy had bought.

Five minutes, and he’ll get out of here. It’s barely a blip on the screen of the day, but it’s a long damn time to wait when everyone passing you seems to hold a deeply personal vendetta against your shins. “About time,” Bucky grouses when Becka’s twin ponytails bob close enough that he can yell and be heard. “Your friends wear steel-toed boots, or something?”

“Huh?”

“Steel-toed boots. Do they wear them?”

“What are you even talking about?”

“They kick me,” he says plaintively. “It hurts.”

Becka grins. “I’ll give you my shin guards next time, promise.”

“You’re my favourite sister.”

“I’m your only sister.”

“Help me carry my stuff?”

And Becka’s grin goes sharklike. “Try it, and I’ll kick you in the shins.”

There is, thankfully, no more injury caused as they walk back home, even if the elevator doesn’t work and they have to walk up twelve flights of stairs. Eleven and three quarters, really, and then Bucky stops short. A shrimp of a person stands on their front doorstep, swimming in clothes, hand raised as if to knock. His blond hair glints in the dim light coming through the window at the end of the hallway. His other hand is cradled in front of him, like it’s hurt.

Bucky knows who it is the instant he lays eyes on him. He half-expects him to disappear as soon as to turn around. It’s a surprise when he doesn’t. It’s a bigger surprise when he sees that Steve’s nose is bleeding profusely and his eye’s puffed up and the same shade as a blueberry. Becka gasps next to him, then runs over and up the rest of the stairs to Steve and hugs him— “Hey, kiddo,” Steve says, and ruffles her hair— and asks if he’s okay and what happened to him and Bucky feels a little like throwing up. Bucky feels like the world is spinning and that he is spinning the same direction but a little slower so they almost match up but not quite. It takes a while for him to get to the door. “Steve,” he says. “Jesus Christ, are you okay?”

Steve looks at him kind of guiltily.

“Becka, shoo.” She glares at him as he gestures for her to go on, get out of here, but complies. The door is thin enough that he hears her running to get Mom. “What the hell happened?”

“I had ag aggident, sord ob.”

“Sort of?” Bucky asks, incredulous. “What actually happened?”

“I,” Steve says, and hesitates. “I ran indo a wall.”

“Bullshit.”

Steve’s jaw is set. He says nothing.

“Steve, what happened,” Bucky tries, more gently.

“Id was a brick wall.”

There is nothing more to be got out of him. Bucky brings him into the house and sits him down on the beige sofa, makes him tilt his head forward and pinch the bridge of his nose. He flounders a little, running through what else to do, and gets Steve a bag of frozen peas because he’s watched movies. He also grabs one of those charmed, endlessly absorbent handkerchiefs his mom got from those infomercials a while ago; it’s not exactly great, and only operates for a given value of ‘endlessly’, but it’ll have to do.

Steve accepts the help and a glass of water. He accepts watching _The Little Mermaid_ while Bucky does his homework, and doesn’t say anything while it’s happening. Bucky just ploughs steadily through Arithmancy and then calculus and a short PEAL paragraph on one cause of the Witches’ Revolution of the year eighteen-fifty-whatever, and tries to ignore Steve’s eyes on him as Flotsam and Jetsam circle Ariel. “Any broken bones?” Bucky asks him.

Steve shakes his head.

“Sprains?”

Another shake of the head.

“Torn ligaments?”

“Whad’s a ligamend?”

Bucky looks at his remaining Arithmancy shit, sighs, and gives it up as a lost job.

He’s explaining the functionality of elbows to Steve, with some difficulty (“So there’s a part that when you hit it, your arm goes numb and you can’t move it? That seems practical”) when his mom creaks through the front door, sees Steve, and her eyes widen.

“Steve? What on earth happened to you?”

.

Steve spends the night again.

He’s a lot quieter this time. Sort of concentrated, sharp, like light focused in on itself. It’s a little like the first time he was in Bucky’s room, in that Bucky can feel him fuming away; it’s different, in that Bucky wants to know what Steve did, what he saw, and he can’t bring himself to ask.

Slowly, though, the tension ebbs out of the room, out the half-open window into the city night, and a tiredness replaces it. Soon they are asleep.

He dreams that they meet over and over again. Over and over and over, a fever threaded through the fabric of his normal life, like stitches in embroidery on curtains that flare out in the wind, like letters in words in bad analogies in circular sentences that swallow themselves whole, over and over and over. And Bucky dreams that his eyes open, and he gets off the mattress and glides over to his own bed. He touches Steve’s face, and says _Be whole_ , and so Steve is. And so he is too.

.

Steve is still there the next morning.

He’s twisted in the bedsheets in a way that should, theoretically, be uncomfortable, but remains fast asleep. The black eye is gone. His face is peaceful. He’s drooling on Bucky’s pillow. It’s more heartwarming than it should be.

Bucky throws a pillow at him. “Get up.”

“Fuck you,” Steve says.

And that is how the day begins.

Bucky gets the day off school, and a twenty-dollar bill, and instructions to take Steve somewhere nice. First, though, he’s got to return Becka’s and his books to the library. So they take the L-train and try to ignore the twitching, muttering pile of clothes in the middle of the carriage, keeping their eyes steadfastly fixed on the hex insurance ads and shitty graffiti. The nice thing about the library is that the train doors open directly to it, and so Bucky and Steve tumble out the banged-up doors into the air-conditioned, pristine entrance. Steve’s eyes are bigger than moons as Bucky drops the books into the _return_ chute. He’s looking past the glass doors to the shelves and shelves of books and books. What else can Bucky do?

They spend the morning there. Regrettably, Bucky doesn’t have his card with him, but Steve devours words the same way most people’s lungs devour air. He likes history and art the most, it seems, if the eighteen thousand books piled up next to him are any indication. Bucky reads over his shoulder, but he also grabs a trashy scifi novel that’s trying to flutter away from its shelf— a librarian with a butterfly net looks at him gratefully— and leans back and reads it, feet touching Steve’s as they sit on the floor.

They leave, eventually, when Bucky’s hungry enough to eat an encyclopaedia; they exit on the first floor, blinking and dazed, into the harsh sun and bustling city. Steve sees a 7-Eleven across the street, and the hot dogs and the coffee machines and the packets of chips and ramen, and Bucky sees Steve looking and laughs at him and they go in. They get Slurpees— Bucky red, Steve blue— and Steve asks if he can have a hotdog and Bucky tells him that the ones in here suck, come on, he knows a better place. And the sun pours down over them outside, and Steve’s tongue is bluer than the sky as he stares at everything around them: people, dogs and cats, stores, houses, roads, hospitals, just infrastructure in general. The trees really get to him, for some reason. They have to stop a couple times; Steve runs his hands over the bark, crouches down and touches the soil. His eyes are kind of wet. Bucky pretends not to see. The cars, too, gleaming like beetles; the trucks, the honking, and the stop lights turning from red to green. His eyes nearly jump out his skull when he sees the hotdog vendor. “That,” says Steve, “smells amazing.” They get two.

Later, when Bucky’s taken them to the nearest park and they’re sitting on a bench, Steve smiles at Bucky through a mouthful of hotdog, there in the warm blue and yellow afternoon. The strangest thing happens to Bucky’s heart. It drops right through the bottom of his stomach, but also flies right into his throat, which makes talking and eating difficult; he just smiles back.

And then he actually chokes, because oh, God. Oh God, no.

“Clint?” he asks.

And yes, it is Clint. Shining, beaming, strolling over with raised eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

“It’s cool,” Bucky says. “This is, uh. This is Steve. He’s my, um,” and his brain casts around for a word, because technically nobody actually knows about the whole summoning thing, and there’s not really a word for Steve, “cousin,” Bucky finishes at the same time Steve says, “friend,” and they look at each other and shrug.

“You have friends?” Clint asks.

“Shut up,” Bucky says.

“I’m also a star,” Steve says.

“What, like in the movies?”

“Sort of,” Steve says, “not really,” and he gives Clint what Bucky now affectionately refers to as the ol’ razzle dazzle.

“Holy shit,” Clint breathes when it is over. “You— Jesus. Wow.”

“Steve, actually.” A weird, crooked smile pushes at the corner of his mouth. Bucky has the sudden urge to touch it.

Clint’s still talking. “So you’re a star? Like an actual star? Like, a space star?” “Yeah,” Steve says, a little nonplussed but also enjoying this, Bucky can tell.

Clint loses it. Starts talking very fast and loud and asking questions. Bucky thinks of jokes about hot air and balls of gas and does not make them. He just sits there on the bench, in the park, in the sun, and watches Steve, and smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmKeqx5_vq8)
> 
> again, comments and kudos give me life! (picture an IV hooked up to my laptop, and you wouldn't be too far off.) not to sound too desperate but I Value Your Thoughts And Opinions.
> 
> also, this is unbeta'd. so if you see any typos, lmk.


	4. and then the petals fell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which steve is a star.

“Miss me?” Bucky says to Steve in the library bathroom, as he shoves a rolled-up pair of jeans under the cubicle divider.

“Nah,” says Steve. Fabric rustles. A zipper is pulled up.

.

The next time they meet, Steve’s nose looks like an eggplant.

“Jesus Christ, not again,” Bucky says.

.

Steve stands outside Bucky’s front door. He’s got Bucky’s clothes on, and is grinning. “Come here often?”

“You dick,” Bucky says, but smiles.

.

They meet over, and over, and over again. Steve leaves, but never for long.

.

One night, Steve stays. He stays the next day, too.

.

And the next.

.

And the next.

.

He stays an entire month.

Steve doesn’t go to school, which Bucky thinks is vaguely unfair but probably safe. He spends all day at the library, or poring over Bucky’s textbooks, or helping Bucky’s mom run errands, and so on. He draws, too. Bucky comes back from school some days to find him staring out the window and drawing the city, the trees. Mostly he draws people though. Quick sketches, loose lines, what he calls “gestural” and Bucky calls “scribbles”. But they’re nice. Some of them are more detailed; those ones are always faces, and the neck, and the collarbones. Those ones are unfinished, and centered around the eyes.

“You should hang these up,” Bucky says one day, draped over the back of the couch watching Steve. Watching Steve draw, that is.

“Where, the fridge?” Steve scoffs.

And that is where most of them end up.

The apartment sort of grows around Steve, or maybe he grows into it, Bucky doesn’t know. Like those trees that grow around rocks, or cats that melt like puddles into containers. He gets used to seeing Steve on the sofa in the living room, head stuck in a book about art or politics or some shit equivalent; helping Becka with math; laying out the plates for dinner. He gets used to someone in his bedroom. He gets used to looking at his room from the floor, the thin strips of light painted on the wall above his desk, and Steve’s steady breaths pushing the moon across the sky.

.

And one day there is an empty sleep shirt and pair of pajama pants on Bucky’s bed, and a note saying _thank you_ , and that is that for a while.

.

“Do you know when he’s coming back?” Becka asks him that morning.

Bucky just shrugs.

.

But he deals with it, he does. He avoids it at least. God knows he’s got other shit to be worried about.

Like finals, which are veering dangerously close. Like college.

It’s starting to stress him out in a way he never thought or knew it could. There’s the issue of money, and so the issue of scholarships, yeah, but it’s more than that. It’s the places he’s applying to. It’s what they mean. It doesn’t feel like a choice for a few years; it feels like a forever kind of decision, one that’ll come back like a rash or a stray cat. It feels like he’s Choosing His Path, full stop.

It scares him, because— fuck, if there were a right decision and he knew it he could just brace himself and bite down, but there’s no real choice when _Everything Is Right If You Have Potential!_ — which he does. He has airplane hangars full of potential, when it comes right down to it, if his teachers and his mom and his everyone else is correct. He could get into SHIELD, or HYDRA, though it is notoriously painful to try: he could get into the two top universities in the country, in the entire damn world. He summoned a star when he wasn’t really thinking and now he has dark, strange dreams, and he doesn’t understand it, any of it. And it scares him. It really does. It’s not just a question of which one he’s going to choose. It’s a question of who he is meant to be. _Can I do this_ becomes _what can I even do_ becomes _will I_ becomes _am I_ becomes _who am I?_

So.

Not fun. It also means there’s no short, truthful, or socially acceptable answer to the “What colleges are you thinking about?” his university counsellor— thank God for school funding— asks him now, with a smile. He clicks his pen and holds it poised over his clipboard.

“Um,” Bucky says. His knee starts to bounce a little. He looks out the window, to the tangle of gray and brown buildings outside, at the birds scrawling their paths on the flat blue. “I don’t really know.”

They go through his grades, which are pretty damn impressive— he works hard— and his track record of sports and activities and everything, everything. Bucky’s kind of sweaty. His counsellor’s got the same reassuring smile on. It doesn’t help.

.

Time passes. School happens. Dreams happen. It just carries on, life, time, whatever: it keeps pushing forward. Runs through Bucky’s hands like sand. Autumn turns to winter. He keeps the spare clothes in his bag and the toothbrush and the mattress. And still Steve is not here.

.

Bucky tries to dream him here. It worked, sometimes, before. When he’s in the desert, the one with the stars and the Things, he looks at the stars, squints right at them and tries to find Steve. And when he’s awake he goes to the park, sometimes, and tries; or he sits by his window and closes his eyes and tries to get back to the snag in the sky, the one that made the universe unravel and Steve come tumbling down.

.

He just isn’t there.

.

Winter comes and winter goes.

Soon, all that is left of it is the muddied slush on the roads. But even then the trees are breaking green into the sharp, cold sky. There’s homework to be done and parties to go to. Bucky just sort of goes along with it all, along with Clint, and doesn’t drink or smoke or snort anything, just watches by the side, because he isn’t stupid. Also, he’s had enough trippy shit to last him the rest of his life.

Bucky gets by.

He’s kicking some of the dead, muddied slush around on his way back from school, when he accidentally kicks some of it onto a person—

Bucky looks up.

Wide blue eyes staring right back at him.

He’s pulling Steve into a hug before he knows what’s happening; a short, tight, embarrassing hug, which he steps out of slower than he’d like and quicker than he can bear. “What’s up?” he says, trying to sound casual while taking in as much of Steve as he can. The clothes: jacket too large and pants too tight. The hands, jammed into his pockets. His nose, bitten reddish with cold. And he looks like the world’s about to end in two minutes, and he’s talking just as quick.

“They found me,” Steve says. His voice is almost pleading. “Buck, they found me, I gotta go, I have to go back—”

“Who—”

“I can’t talk,” Steve says. “I can’t. I’ll get back soon as I can, promise.”

Bucky gapes, open-mouthed, a fish. “Where did you go?” he says at last. “You— a couple months ago, I thought—”

People look at them, curious, passing by. Silver pulses in Steve’s wrist. Bucky’s throat is thick.

This street is not the right place. There is no right place; this shouldn’t be happening.

“I had to go,” Steve says softly. “I’ll be back.”

“You can’t just,” Bucky says, eyes hot.

“I’ll be back,” Steve says again.

And then Steve is gone.

.

He is gone.

.

Not for long, though.

A few weeks pass, in which Bucky spends an inordinate amount of time dazed, struck grey and empty. He looks into mirrors blankly. He stumbles through his schooldays and trips over his front doorstep. He’s got shit to be worried about, just the same as before, but he can’t get himself to be worried about it. His mom asks him what’s wrong. He doesn’t know how to answer. Days stretch into weeks. A month is pressed tight into a day.

And—

Life has a funny way of taking the grandeur out of moments that should, by rights, be grand as a Steinway. There’s no fanfare that sounds at that meaningful thought, no violins for when you cry, no _eeeeeeeeeee_ sound for when you feel numb or have been partially deafened, no orchestra that crescendoes all the way up to one, beautiful moment where the clouds break and the sun shines through and everything has, at last, been irreversibly changed, and things are looking up.

So it is that he bumps into Steve when he’s leaving for school in the morning. Steve’s hand is raised like it’s about to knock; the welcome mat is again, over his crotch. Bucky feels a little dizzy, a little bit of deja-vu. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what to do. Weirdly, he wants to laugh, and a snort escapes him before he knows what’s happening.

Steve’s face reddens. “Shut up.”

“Oh my God,” Bucky says, light-headed; “oh my _God_.”

“I swear—”

“ _Oh my God_.”

“—if you don’t—”

Eventually Bucky stops wheezing long enough to get Steve inside and a very shocked Becka and Winifred Barnes outside— “you can stay home, honey,” his mom says faintly, “just get Steve some clothes, won’t you?”— where he collapses against the wall and lets it all out. Steve is here, all his atoms, all his bone and blood and body, all of him, here, now. The world’s worryingly bright and beautiful as Steve glares at him and shifts from foot to foot, uncomfortable.

Steve gets clothes on soon after, and Bucky brings two grilled cheeses to his room, and Steve attacks it in a way Bucky’s only seen on nature documentaries, so he gives Steve the second and just sits there and watches him eat. He watches him lick the crumbs off his fingers. He wonders how long it’s been since Steve has eaten. He aches, here in his sunlit bedroom; he aches.

“How’s life,” is all he says.

“It’s okay,” Steve says. “It’s— yeah. It’s fine.”

There’s something off in his voice, and a small twist between his eyebrows that Bucky doesn’t like.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Bull.”

“I said, nothing.”

“And I said bull. 

“You’ve never seen me,” Steve says, a little too loud and close.

“Then show me,” Bucky says.

Steve’s eyes are fixed tight on his. “You asked for it.”

“I did.”

.

Something happens to Bucky’s room: it stops being his room, and starts being outer space.

It is black, and where it is not black it is either grey or blindingly white, and where it is not either of those— and Bucky’s breath catches, and he notices that he can breathe, improbably— where it is not either of those, it is Steve.

Except it’s not Steve.

It is gas, fierce and hotter than anything Bucky has ever felt, but his skin remains unblistered, his eyes are not ash. It turns slowly; Bucky can hear the centuries creak past. 

“This is me,” says the star, voice as dead as scraping rock. “And this isn’t even my true face.”

“Oh, yeah?” Bucky folds his arms.

The star’s eyes narrow. “I have seen more things than you will ever forget.”

“So you’re old.”

“I am older than anyone you know.”

“And you look and sound like every other sixteen-year-old idiot I know.”

The star glares. “I was born in a cloud of dust and gas in the middle of a void. I was nothingness, and then I was. And there was light, a terrible light, and I burned in the middle of it.”

“And I was born in a hospital in New Jersey,” Bucky says. Vast spaces between electrons, the gulfs between stars. The distance in him and around him. It stretches out, silent. He wishes there was someone here other than him who would laugh.

“Aren’t you afraid?” asks the star.

The void tilts dark around Bucky. Everything is dizzy now, fizzing away at the edges, stars going spaghetti at the corners of his vision. “Of you?” Bucky says. “No.”

The star flares bright. “Then you’re stupid.”

“Then I’m stupid,” Bucky says, forcing a smile. It’s hard. Air is coming slower, and his lungs are tight. His body doesn’t belong to him, and doesn’t want to move. “Glad we agree.”

The star is shrinking down to boy-shaped. Voice still like rock, but sedimentary this time; like chalk that goes soft under your hands; chalk worn down from use and touch, scarred by fingernail-sized crescents. Quiet words scrawled against black space: “You’re not stupid.”

“Seems to me,” Bucky says with very little air and rapidly dimming vision, “I kind of am,” and he passes out.

.

He does not dream.

.

When he wakes, the first thing he sees is Steve.

This is maybe inaccurate. The first thing he sees is the inside of his eyelids, which he forces open on old, rusted hinges. It’s painful. It’s also only then that he sees Steve, face pale in the dark and very close.

“Bucky,” his too-close mouth is saying. “Bucky, wake up.”

“Guh.”

“Can you hear me?” Steve says urgently. “Buck-”

“Course I can hear you.”

Slowly, the bed occurs to him; the soft pillow, the lumpy springs, familiar. And the dark isn’t the dark of space but the dark of his room when the lights aren’t on, and the light struggling through the blinds is that tricky shade of blue that could be early-early morning, or late-late evening. He doesn’t know. Steve’s on his knees next to him. His hand is on Bucky’s wrist. His eyes are almost black in this difficult light.

“I am so, so sorry.”

Bucky blinks. “What for?”

“You almost.” Steve’s voice catches, and Bucky realises his eyes are wet. “You almost died.”

“That was me being stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Agree to disagree.”

Bucky’s not sure what happens next, just that Steve’s warm hand brushes against his forehead and his eyes drift shut, he’s relaxing into it, he’s expanding like he doesn’t have to be in his skin anymore.

The next thing he knows, it’s gone, and he’s sitting up sharp. The light outside is brighter now. “Steve?” he calls out. He rushes through the house— empty and silent, Becka and his mom are still asleep— to the living room, into the boxed-in joke of a balcony, where Steve stands barefoot on rain-cold metal. His eyes are closed. “Steve,” Bucky says again, “come on—”

“I can’t keep hurting you.”

“You _don’t_.”

“No.”

Steve begins to glow, a hand held over a torch, and then the light goes silvery. Now it’s Bucky’s turn to say, “No.”

“I have to go.”

Bucky’s throat closes. “No, you don’t.”

“I—”

“No, you fucking don’t!” Bucky yells. Shadows writhe around him like they’re being electrocuted; he doesn’t care. “I’m not afraid of you. Who else, Steve. Who else is going to— you’re the only one.” He’s crying now, like a goddamn idiot. “You’re the only one who knows, and it gets so bad sometimes, it gets so bad.” He seizes Steve’s hands and presses them to his chest. “This. Here. The— the black hole, whatever the fuck it is. You feel it. I know you do. You—”

“Bucky,” Steve says.

The light throbs in his wrist. Bucky’s hands are still tight around Steve’s. It’s dark as it gets in the city, here, and cold as fuck, and the rain isn’t helping, and neither is the wind. Bucky’s heart beats out of him, warm. They are very close.

“I can’t stay,” Steve says quietly.

A moment passes, and another.

“Then go,” Bucky says, voice raw.

They are close enough to kiss.

Steve, softly: “I’ll miss you.”

There is something gaping open inside Bucky and it hurts, it hurts, and the wound does not bleed blood but hot salt that scrapes him raw, that stings his eyes, that makes it difficult to breathe. Rain pours down so heavy it drags the night sky down with it. Somewhere beyond the clouds there are stars. Bucky shuts his eyes.

And Steve goes.

.

Bucky is alone on a fire escape in the rain.

He opens his eyes.

He goes back inside.

.

The next morning, he has to deal with the fact that he’s been missing for a full day, James Buchanan Barnes do you know how worried we all were. He does not care.

A week passes: cold, dead, time. He does not care.

An interview. College stuff again. Words falling on empty ears. Something HYDRA. Something scholarship. Something immediate. Something shadows, pooling around his feet, twisting around his ankles. His hand, lifting.

Something, now. He sees it: teeth. Sharp. Black. Nothing. But not quite yet. It’s still waiting.

His hand, holding a pen. His hand, signing.

He does not care.

.

Steve is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BENziAcChrA).
> 
> the angstiest chapter yet! if you loved it, pls comment. if you liked it, pls comment. if you hated it, pls comment. your feedback is gold.


	5. very far, very far

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which time has passed, and steve comes back.

It’s four in the morning and Bucky is freezing his ass off.

A slight breeze rustles the garbage bags in the alley below him. It plucks the autumn leaves off the sparse, stunted trees struggling towards the streetlights, a couple of streets over; it twists around his fingers till they’re numb and clumsy with cold. He jams his hands under his armpits. His teeth clack. The noise is sharp against the low, electric hum woven into the air, from the charmed light above him, the cables strewn across the rooftop.

A car rushes past, twenty storeys below him. Bucky kicks halfheartedly, watches his feet swing, and his heels thud against the side of the building. An exhale: his breath curls in front of him. This was a bad idea. But he can deal with the cold, he can, and so he shifts around a little. The concrete is rough and damp and kinda nasty; he’ll be picking gravel out of his jeans for days. He can deal.

He shifts around a little more so he’s leaning back on his elbows. Hands in fists, propping him up. Head tipped up to the cotton-ball clouds, stretched thin against a starless sky. Jesus, it’s cold. He can hear Sam crystal-clear, telling him that his refusal to use a heating charm here and the relentless _man the fuck up, dude_ , is somewhat unhealthy, and that he should really get into that, unpack it some, see where the emotions lead him. But this rooftop is where the emotions have led him— this empty rooftop, staring up at an empty sky, because his goddamn _emotions_ have woken him up in the middle of the night and his throat is raw and his eyes sting not just because of the cold.

And hey. An empty rooftop is better than a tray of empty shot glasses at Thor’s, and a broken voice is better than a broken hand because he’s punched a wall, and then having to deal with a flurry of ridiculously high medical bills— thanks, capitalism!— and spending two afternoons searching for a Healer, and staring despondently at YouTube search results for _how to fix a wall_ , and then getting sucked down the rabbit hole of WikiHow, and then Reddit, and then Pinterest, and— yeah. The point is that there’s a laundry list of worse things he could be doing. This is pretty okay.

There’s also a laundry list of better options, but: a) talking to Becka is now impossible without a necromancer, and he sure as shit isn’t going _there_ again; b) he feels kind of guilty at the thought of waking up his therapist-Healer-neighbour-friend at four in the morning; c) meditation is off the table. He isn’t going to start braiding his hair and wearing yoga pants and talking earnestly about chakras and third eyes, or whatever it is Natasha does.

Anyway. His chest still hurts but he’s breathing, and no longer suffocating in a musty tangle of bedsheets, so.

Here he is.

A heating charm would have been a good idea, but Bucky hasn’t had one of those in about eighty-six years.

And then he senses it, tenses up: there is something on the roof with him.

He whirls around, and it stops moving. It’s cat-shaped, a patchwork of darks and lights. Nat’s calico, Goose.

Slowly, he breathes out.

Goose moves over, looking extraordinarily like a cat for something named after a bird, and sits on the ledge and licks her paws. She regards him with reflective eyes.

“You too, huh?”

Goose eyes him a little longer before edging closer.

“Come here,” he says, crossing his legs and pushing himself up. He sticks out a hand— not the metal one, that one spooks her— to skritch her behind the ears; she brushes against his thigh and settles by his knees, claws all tucked away. He allows himself a smile. It might be sad his only company’s a cat, but she’s living, breathing; she purrs, a steady rumble in her chest. She looks content.

“You know something?” he says. The words hang hopeful and stupid in the air. Goose blinks at him.

They stay there a while, long enough that his foot falls asleep, long enough that his thoughts go the consistency of overcooked pasta. Thoughts about familiars and the witching hour and how the sharp, electric buzz is clearer now, and sounds like magic, like power, thrumming in the air around them. And how the lights flicker; how still his heart, how high the moon. They’re there long enough that Goose loses interest and wanders away, leaving Bucky alone on the roof.

Bucky, despite it all, is a sentimental kind of guy. He has _The Little Mermaid_ soundtrack saved on Spotify, and he keeps a spare toothbrush in the mug by his sink, though he doesn’t carry a change of clothes with him. And when he feels lonely or the black hole opens up in his chest, he looks at the sky. And Bucky, despite the goosebumps on his arms, is getting used to the cold, sort of, so he keeps looking at the stars beyond the clouds, in the dark, in his fluorescent yellow t-shirt he got for two bucks. Inhale, exhale. Unspooling in the shadowy, sodium-tinted streetlights, blurring his vision till the air dissipates and everything’s 1080p again. He does this for a while till the world slows down and the tangles loosen. Until his mind is clear.

“Hey,” he says to the empty sky. “It’s been getting kind of shitty.”

The sky does not reply.

“This is stupid. This is stupid and I’m stupid and what the fuck am I doing, but— well. It’s a nice night out. Freezing, but nice. And I figure if you’re going to get here—”

Voices, loud, passing under him; the heavy clink of glass bottles. Bucky waits till they are gone.

“—it’s an open space.”

Silence.

“I know you’re not going to reply,” he continues, “but it would be nice. It’s been a while. And I look crazy talking to myself on this damn roof.”

Time stretches out and yawns. But the silence doesn’t sting Bucky like it used to, because he’s used to it. He realises for the first time how alone he is on this roof. He makes to get down.

And suddenly—

A flash of blinding white. A noise like a marching band falling down a long set of stairs. A groan, and then another crash, smaller, like the cymbals fell over.

Bucky’s heart leaps out his chest cavity into his throat, and he’s scrambling up, pounding down the fire escape before his brain catches up and says _hey, um, what?_. His shoes slip on rain-slick metal but he’s down, bones decidedly un-broken, in less than a minute.

He turns the corner in a flat-out sprint, round the building’s back where the exposed brick crumbles and the old, springless sofa sags, and the boxes have piled up and there’s something that looks like a crumpled pile of clothes in the mountain of garbage bags that is stirring, rising. Bucky halts. The clothes are on a bulky frame. Blond hair glints in the dim, dim light. Gash on his chin. Bloody nose. Left hand cradled in the crook of his other arm. Breath rising, wheezing and ragged; tiny clouds floating up to the ones in the sky. And blue eyes that spark in recognition, and Steve’s face almost literally lights up.

“Hey, Buck.”

Bucky’s heart is singing. Heavenly choirs shine down bright enough to blind him; there are trumpets and strings and an entire woodwind section in glorious surround sound. There’s an entire militia of cherubs and angels plucking furiously at their harps. He feels the sudden urge to twirl on a grassy hilltop in Austria, throw his arms out and smile benevolent at the sheep. He is, in short, ridiculously happy.

“Jesus,” Bucky says instead. “Again?”

“I could have gotten this from the landing,” Steve points out, defensive. “You picked a real great place to be, pal. I nearly crash-landed on the damn roof.”

“I didn’t ask you to crash-land anywhere,” Bucky sort of half-lies. Is it a lie if you don’t know the truth?

“You know how they changed the spell. I can only show up in a seven-meter radius.”

“Still can’t believe they use metric.”

“It’s the better system,” Steve says, with a long-suffering sigh that turns into a cough.

Bucky can’t help but feel like the conversation has derailed. “Anyway,” he says, in an attempt to get it back on track to _Steve-Rogers-What-Have-You-Done_ sville. “You got into a fight.”

Steve mutters something that might include the words “some hello”, but Bucky’s brain is fried like an egg from all that light earlier, and the heavenly choir’s popped back up to Heaven, leaving him with his heartbeat in his ears, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with his arms. It’s been nine years. “Didn’t you say you weren’t going to do anything stupid?” Bucky asks.

A familiar scowl settles on Steve’s face. It’s nice that his face is still familiar, because the _rest_ of him— Bucky has to actually look up at him. “For your information, I didn’t get this in a fight.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I _got_ this,” Steve says, sour, “because you decided to sit on a rooftop for some reason.”

Ah. That.

“Oh. That,” Bucky says. “Yes.”

“But I have, you know, maybe in the past few weeks—”

“I swear to God—”

“I can handle myself.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and tries to stop staring at his biceps, which, what the hell, he _has_ them now. “How’s that working out for you.”

“I had ‘em on the ropes.”

“ _Them_?” Bucky says, lightheaded. “Plural?”

“So what?”

“So, you got a death wish?”

“I can handle myself,” Steve says again.

“No, I can see that,” Bucky says, and looks very pointedly at all the sundry cuts and bruises on Steve. “You look just fine.”

“Better than you,” Steve says. Bucky blinks, and Steve’s face drops slightly; his words rush into the sudden stillness between them. “That shirt’s so bright I could see it from space.”

“Ha,” Bucky says dourly. He forces a smile, waits till it’s properly taken hold of him to speak. “Asshole. It’s good to see you. It’s been—” he swallows past something he can’t name— “too long.”

“Yeah.” Steve’s eyes flicker down to his shoes, then back up. “Yeah, it has.”

“How long you been, you know, around?”

Steve’s face is marble. “Six months.”

“Six months,” Bucky repeats.

“I was in Thailand and Vietnam a lot. And then I went to Mongolia, saw a bit of Russia, too.”

“Uh huh.”

“And then I landed in Chile, weirdly. Zapped myself a few places. I always wanted to see South America.”

“Cool,” says Bucky. “What’s it like?”

“Hot, mainly. The mountains are cold though.”

“They do that,” Bucky says stupidly; he grins. He is thinking _six months, six months, six months_ , over and over. Six months, and Steve shows up here, now. He looks at him, all of him. “You’ve changed.”

“So have you,” Steve says.

Silence.

“Come here,” Bucky says. Steve shuffles closer and Bucky opens his arms, closes the distance between them. Underneath all the dumpster, Steve smells a little like the airport. Like he’s just dropped out the ozone layer. He breathes it in— one second, two— before patting Steve’s shoulder, stepping away. “You got showers up in the sky?”

“Never really needed one.”

“You do now,” says Bucky. Steve scowls at him, and he laughs. “You wanna come on up?”

He does, so they do. Round to the front of the building. Bucky doesn’t have his keys- didn’t think he’d need them- but the main door’s always unlocked, anyway, if you know where to push. They enter. It’s warmer inside, if only marginally; he can still see his breath. Central heating down here is a fucking joke. Walking over cracked tiles to a button in the wall. Waiting, for a moment or eighty-three, in the dark, for the elevator to come; here, in the shadows, Steve is actually glowing. He remembers watching an eclipse once, when he was a kid. Him and Becka had to squint at the sun through a hole punched in black card with a pin. It’s like that, multiplied over and over. Starlight shines faintly through his pores.

Bucky’s eyes keep flickering over to Steve, but he can’t help it: Steve is there and he is whole. He is solid. A brick shithouse, even. His shoes are beat-up and scuffed as he toes the floor, impatient. Bucky huffs out a laugh.

“There something on my face?” Steve asks. The elevator dings.

“You look like a three year old,” Bucky says, and Steve throws a dirty look over his shoulder as they crowd into the tiny box that’s only just wide enough to fit them both.

He reaches around Steve, the human-shaped collection of atoms named Steve that is standing, real, right there in front of him, to press the button for the ninth floor. The _1_ and _5_ on the panel are in a different font, and look brighter, newer. The light’s flickering and a warm sort of orange, the mirror spotted black and cracked with age. It’s dusty. Bucky wonders, as they go up, if he could get paid to Windex it up a little. He doesn’t usually take the lift, too damn small— but this is a tightness he doesn’t mind. “You hungry?”

Metal judders around them. “Not really,” says Steve, and Bucky raises an eyebrow.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Tomorrow, though.”

 _It_ is _tomorrow_ , Bucky does not say. Whatever. He cooks a mean omelette, and he knows he’s got onions and ham and bell peppers and cheese, somewhere; Steve is gonna have the best damn breakfast of his _life_ after this. He’s feeling a little giddy. A yawn. The elevator dings again, and spits them out into the dark corridor.

“Watch your step,” Bucky warns: one of the pipes in the ceiling drips constantly, and there’s a bucket under it which he’s accidentally knocked over three too many times. Steve edges around it, stumbles a bit. Bucky sees his jaw clench as his hand jostles. A familiar pang shoots through his chest. Door. “That broken?” Door. “Sprained wrist, I think.” Door. “Jesus _Christ_.” Door. Defensively: “What?” And they’ve reached Bucky’s apartment, now: Bucky lifts up the corner of the disturbingly floral welcome mat ( _Live Laugh Love_ , looping cursive) that Sam gave him as a joke, and picks up his keys— “Human 101,” Bucky tells Steve as he fiddles with the lock, “don’t keep your keys here or you’re gonna get burgled,” and Steve opens his mouth, probably to point out the obvious hypocrisy in his logic, but before any full words can exit the door’s open; Bucky ushers Steve in with an unnecessary palm between his shoulder blades. Locks the door behind him, flicks on the lights. “Home sweet home.” Steve looks around appreciatively— it’s warm, bright, and just because most of his stuff is from thrift stores and yard sales doesn’t mean he’s not meticulously neat— but there’s a stiffness to him that Bucky recognises. He’s hurt more badly than he’s letting on.

Bucky removes the hand. “You’re sure it’s sprained.”

“Bucky, I’m _fine_.”

Bucky’s Steve-to-English translations are rough at best, but what he’s getting here is a resounding _yes, Bucky, I’m injured and I need help and I’m too proud to ask for it_.

“I have bandages in the bathroom,” he says. _Dipshit_ , he adds silently and affectionately.

They turn past the couch and coffee table with the fold-up chairs underneath it, where his laptop is charging, past the kitchen with the surprisingly good stove and the ancient washing machine in the back, down the hallway past the storage room and bedroom to the bathroom. He flips the switch. The light takes a moment to flicker on, and they’re in the dark for a moment, the bulb glowing a strange half-red before something buzzes and light spills over every surface, over the the beige tiles and yellowed plastic dividers boxing the shower into the corner, the porcelain of the toilet and sink, shining taps, the mug on the sink holding two toothbrushes and a half-used tube of toothpaste; all of it briefly blinding. Steve blinks. 

Bucky sits Steve on the toilet seat— down, obviously; despite the state of the grout he’s not a complete heathen— and opens the medicine cabinet, grabs a couple rolls of bandages and a half-tube of antiseptic cream, a half-full bottle of Advil and half a half-expired Tylenol for good measure. He’s guessing about the half-expired bit. 

“We can get you fixed up properly in the morning,” Bucky tells him. “My friend’s a Healer. His name’s Sam, you’d like him.”

Steve nods. Bucky pretends not to notice the wince that accompanies it.

“Hold still.”

Bucky starts to wrap the bandage around Steve’s wrist. Steve hisses a curse through clenched teeth, and Bucky can’t ignore it. “Too tight?”

“I’m not a child, Buck.”

The hardness in Steve’s voice is not unfamiliar, but Bucky blinks all the same. This one is— different, kinda. He pushes it away and finishes wrapping Steve’s wrist.

They move to the living room and the nice IKEA sofa. He doesn’t have a TV, but he’s got the password to Tony’s Netflix account. (The password changes about once every two weeks, but it’s become increasingly, ridiculously easy to crack: the last was _peppapotts_ , the one directly before that _pepperpig_ , so it’s not, you know, rocket science. It would seem Stark leaves that for his actual rockets.) He sets up his laptop and starts on Season Fuck Episode I Don’t Know of Chopped. And they sit down on Bucky’s springless sofa and watch Alton Brown rubbing his hands together as that Kathy chick gets a drummer-boy outfit and Jacqueline reigns supreme and Jean-Pierre or whatever his name is sits there practically twirling his mustache, and halfway through the next episode Steve’s head lolls on Bucky’s shoulder and he mumbles something quiet about wanting to watch something else. And so they go onto some property finding shit. Inwardly, Bucky sighs. Outwardly, Bucky looks at the damp and mildew in his own apartment before turning back to Michael and Sherri-with-an-i finding a nice place next to some lake in Bumfuck, Nowhere— okay, fine, it’s either North Carolina or South Dakota, but he’s too drowsy to pay attention. The houses are beautiful but they all say no, no, no and the host may or may not be gay, which makes him tap Steve’s knee, ask “Does he not look the least bit gay to you?” and Steve’s half-muffled response “I don’t really see how someone’s appearance would tell me what their sexual preferences are, Buck, unless they’re wearing a shirt that says _I’m Gay—_ Buck, no, look at me, it’s still stereotyping no matter who does it—” and then Bucky’s “Jeez, okay Mr. Rogers.”

And inwardly, Bucky kind of likes this, being in the warm, yawning dark with Steve. Eventually the yawning becomes too much for the both of them to keep watching, so halfway through Charlene and Tony’s journey to find a holiday home for their eight cousins, three siblings, fifteen and a half grandkids and a cat and a dog and maybe a horse, Bucky shuts the laptop. They can catch up on the Rest of Pop Culture later, in the morning. Bucky puts a hand around Steve’s shoulder because despite the blankets he’s shivering like crazy, teeth jackhammering the quiet into shards. The shivers slow. They’re silent, both of them. And their silence is warm. It spreads between them and warps the air till it shimmers, though that might be Bucky’s tiredness; the sun rises, out the tiny tiny window. The sky is bruising to blue.

Steve’s eyes drift shut at last, and Bucky stays there, in the half-dark, till his own eyelids are half-mast and closing, resting on something soft that isn’t a sofa and has too many elbows. He wishes, drowsily, that he could be a star. That instead of soft marrow, he could have the sun burning in his bones; that his eyes would gleam silver; that static would crackle in his fingernails, and in his palms would be power enough to raise the dead.

The world outside brightens as his own falls backward, backward, backward still, and then he’s suspended in space. Vast galaxies surround him, crowded with infinite planets, and star-streaked swathes of ink ribbon around him, glistening as they orbit around suns, and stretch and swirl towards black holes. He stays there, for a while, in the friendly darkness— giggling asteroids, laughing moons with star-filled mouths— and then the dream shifts: he is floating in the middle of an ocean that he knows, somehow, is really much smaller than it feels. He looks up at the surface through his sunlit hair, at the light streaming in, the slanted sun fractured and cracked as his bathroom mirror. He sees a pebble falling into a pond, watches the ripples it leaves, the bubbles streaming from it, fever-bright in the murky sunbeams as it drifts all the way down to the bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw)


	6. these magic words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which bucky has more than one friend.

“When you say star,” Sam says.

Bucky stares at him through the open window.

“You mean like in the movies, right?”

Nobody uses Bucky’s front door anymore except him, because it’s ‘temporally unsound’ and ‘unsafe’ and ‘has destroyed resale value’. So Bucky’s got the fire department on speed dial, and in the meantime, people just climb up onto the fire escape, or come in through the window. Sam’s chosen the latter. His wings beat steadily, like he’s treading water; the breeze ruffles Bucky’s hair.

“Look, man, do you want to come on in?”

It takes five minutes of hushed explanation, Bucky glancing over his shoulder to make sure Steve hasn’t stirred from the couch, and then:

“A star,” Sam repeats, glassy-eyed.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, frustrated. “Have you— I mean, Jesus Christ, all those therapy sessions, what the hell, did you zone out every single time I talked about this?”

“I thought it was more, uh…” Sam turns to look at Steve, who is suffused with a faint, silvery glow, snoring like a pig. “Metaphorical.”

“Your mom is metaphorical.”

Sam turns back with a raised eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Bucky mutters.

“So, to recap.” Bucky groans and puts his head in his arms. “Star-Steve is in your apartment, this is the first time you’re seeing him in nine years, and you called me, your ex-therapist, to talk about all this because you’re not worried?”

“No,” Bucky says, “I called you because you’re my _friend_ and I’m not worried.”

A pause. Bucky tries on a winning smile, decides it doesn’t fit, and puts it back.

“Uh huh,” Sam says doubtfully. “Right. Well, you just tell me how that goes for you, because I’ve gotta start getting dinner together.”

Bucky blinks. “It’s ten in the morning, Sam.”

“Yes.”

“Dinner starts at six, Sam.”

“Yes.”

“ _Tomorrow_ , Sam.”

Sam’s already sitting on the windowsill. “Groceries.”

Bucky opens his mouth, and then closes it. “Sure.”

“Text me,” Sam yells up at Bucky, already plummeting down.

He will.

.

“Steve,” says Bucky, softly.

An eye cracks open somewhere in the pretzeled mass of star and blanket on his couch. It squints at him, then gives up and closes again. “Hrgh,” says the mass.

Bucky pokes it. “Steve, wake up.”

The voice is much clearer now. “No.” The blanket pile shifts, revealing a face, a shoulder. The afternoon sunlight slants down, throws light across the slash of Steve’s cheekbone, the bird’s nest that’s decided to take residence on his head.

“It’s four thirty, dipshit. You need to wake up.”

The eye opens again. “Need is a strong word.”

“I’ll show you strong words.”

In the time that Steve’s been asleep, Bucky’s been out and bought groceries and a sling and healing potions, and had time to spare worrying about dinner the next day. It won’t be awful. Probably. Hopefully. There’s free food and good friends, but it’s a Thing, and Bucky tends to not like going to Things. Bucky doesn’t want to do Things. He wants to stay home and make Steve an omelette (to eat. not to like, turn him into one), and he wants to make sure Steve’s okay. But it would be nice for Steve to meet Sam and Nat and Clint; they’ve wanted to meet him for a long, long time, but the fact that Steve had disappeared into space to do star stuff nine years ago and never talked to Bucky sort of put those plans on the backburner. They will literally kill him if they don’t meet Steve. So to the dinner he has resigned himself. It wouldn’t be a problem, if it weren’t for the ridiculous amount of time he had spent waiting for Steve to come back, and then when he got over Steve, and then when he actually got over Steve— and it would be less of a not-problem if he hadn’t spent so much of that damn time talking about all his stupid feelings to his goddamn friends, who know everything.

 _Everything_.

It could be weird, is all.

Clint’s going to go all nudge-nudge-wink-wink and Nat will be Nat and Sam’s gonna start laughing at him when Steve isn’t looking. Which isn’t that bad, really. It does have the side effect of making him feel a little anxious, which in turn switches on the projector in his head which starts to play, completely unprompted, to play _Now That’s What I Call Anxiety! (Greatest Hits), Volume 38,273: You’ve Got Abandonment Issues_. This does not do wonders for his emotional state.

So here he is, standing in front of Steve, being more pissy than is warranted. Dude crash-landed in a dumpster the night before, and Bucky’s here asking him to Get Up And Be A Productive Member Of Society like the Unsympathetic Friend and Capitalist Shill he is.

But Steve still smells like garbage, and he’s still on Bucky’s couch, and Bucky’s couch is kind of soaking up the smell, which is—- what’s the word— icky. More significantly, Bucky’s kind of concerned that Steve will starve if he just lies here unchecked. Also, Steve’s hand is swelling up from what Bucky can see under the blanket, and he’s worried that the wrist might be more than just sprained.

So.

“So help me God, get up or I will make you.”

“Don’t make me fight you,” Steve says, like the total jackass he is. There’s a tectonic shift of blankets as he rolls into a sitting position. He blinks once, twice, sleepily. He stretches. His gaze lands on Bucky, who’s staring. “What?”

“You, thinking you can take me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Fight me,” corrects Bucky’s slow, stupid mouth. “You thinking you can fight me. How many times have I heard that, and how many times have you actually made good on it?”

Steve’s got a small, crooked smile on. “It’s not an empty threat this time.”

“Oh, yeah, you really look like you can hold your own,” Bucky scoffs, and then realises that Steve actually does. His muscles have muscles now.

“You should have seen the other guys.”

 _Why am I doing this_ , Bucky wonders wearily. “You’re so goddamn dramatic sometimes. Hand?”

Steve sticks it out. His arm’s bent at the elbow, tense at the shoulder, and there’s a slight clench to his jaw. Bucky shifts back a couple inches and runs Steve through some basic checks. Rotate your wrist, touch your thumb to your pinky, make a fist. Steve complies, and Bucky watches him carefully; it’s probably a fracture. “I’m fine,” Steve insists.

“No, you’re not,” Bucky says, accurately. “I’m giving you Sam’s potions, and then I’m healing the fracture myself afterwards.”

“How?”

“Conduit stuff.”

Something flashes across Steve’s face. “Bucky—”

“Don’t.”

“Hasn’t it been a while—”

“I said, don’t.”

It turns out that what Bucky is, according to all the hospitals and tests, is a Conduit. It’s how Steve got here: catapulted from the heavens to the Earth with Bucky as the fulcrum. And SHIELD and HYDRA were interested and Steve left forever and Bucky couldn’t think and HYDRA— well, HYDRA got there first, and they were offering him a free ride.

Then HYDRA actually happened. Which is an entire cannery of worms he doesn’t want to get into, even in exposition.

After HYDRA broke him, he didn’t use any magic for a couple years, but now, he’s kind of sort of getting back into Conduit stuff. Nowhere near the same level he was before, though. Like if he was fluent in Spanish, and then woke up one day and had all the vocabulary of half an episode of Dora. HYDRA fucked him up kinda bad there.

Tragic backstory aside, healing magic’s never been his forte, but this should be okay, as long as he thinks of it as a transfer. Conduit stuff on a different level. Like rolling a stone down a seesaw. He tries not to think about how rusty that seesaw is, how many rainy nights it’s sat there in the sandbox.

And then the realisation hits him: “Wait, how do you know it’s been a while?”

“I, uh,” Steve says totally normally, like a normal person with nothing to hide. “I had to leave but I still. Once in a while. You know.”

Bucky forces calm into his voice. “No, I don’t know.”

“I checked up on you.”

“You checked up on me.”

“In a normal way.”

“Sure,” Bucky says. “So, uh— when, exactly, did you check up on me?”

“It was only for a couple moments at a time,” Steve rushes to say. His face is red. “They wouldn’t let me otherwise.”

“They wouldn’t let you?”

“Would you stop?”

“Would I stop what?”

“Repeating every damn thing I say.”

Bucky rewinds and checks over the past twenty seconds. “Oh,” he says. “Uh. Yeah. Sure.” Now his face is red. “Sorry.”

“I saw that they used you,” Steve says. The room is still now. Everything’s quiet except for him. “I saw that they broke you. And I wanted to break them.”

Bucky looks up. Words beat like bird wings inside him, but he can’t say any of them.

“I wish I could have done something. I wish I could have— but they,” Steve says, and he’s a lot quieter now, “back home. They— yeah. Here, too. I couldn’t get away.”

How are you supposed to react, Bucky wonders, when your heart’s been broken and it’s healed and you’re getting the reason almost a decade later? But he finds he can’t care about that, now; he just looks at Steve. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Steve says.

They sit in the silence for a while till it starts getting awkward.

“Are you sure—” Steve starts.

“Yes, _Mom_.”

And Bucky isn’t sure when this turned ugly, but Steve’s face shuts down like a Borders bookstore. A beat: it rearranges itself into something more even. “Fuck off,” he says in a tone far too light to actually be, well, light.

Bucky pauses. There are two options here: ask Steve what’s going on, or just move on and hope for the best. “None of your lip, missy.”

“I’m billions of years—”

“Older than me, yes.”

“It’s a shame.” Steve looks at him, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You kids these days. No respect for your elders.”

Bucky just rolls his eyes and gives Steve the first healing potion. As per the instructions, he waits till Steve’s earlobes have returned to their normal shade of not-purple before chasing it down with the second. “Okay,” he says, and leans back, puts the bottle down on the coffee table. “You really, really need a shower, but you should be okay.”

“Hey, uh,” Steve says suddenly. “Thank you.” His voice is too soft, too earnest for this moment. Silence lingers between them, a curtain caught in the wind, until: “You’re a dick.”

Bucky blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Just because I stink—”

“Stink is an understatement,” Bucky interrupts. “I can hear the garbage germs growing on my couch.”

“My hand’s probably broken, you know.”

“I just gave you a healing potion.” Steve’s mouth is opening, so he cuts him off. “And they’re from a damn good Healer, alright, so don’t give me any crap.” This testimony is doing nothing, so he gives appealing to Steve’s better nature a shot. “Steve, they’re forming colonies. They’re invading the native bacteria’s homes and oppressing their culture.”

“And you call me dramatic.”

Bucky glares at him. “Just take a fucking shower, Rogers.”

.

Bucky’s sitting on his bed and waits for Steve to finish up in the shower, when the surrealness of this entire thing hits him, hard, and he wishes he could sit down but he already his, and just. Jesus. This day is weird. It’s weird, how normal this is, for him to wait for Steve to finish shampooing his perfect hair; how easy it still is, for the most part, to talk to him; to joke and laugh and poke fun at him like they’re both still sixteen (Steve only sort of). Steve showers on the other side of the corridor, and Bucky sits on his bed (technically speaking, a mattress, because Clint decided to host a fireball-powered roller-chair-derby in here and Bucky hasn’t had a bed frame since), and tries not to think of Steve under the water— anyway. He has a text from Nat, asking him how he’s doing. Sam must have told her. He sends back a star emoji and five exclamation marks, and then remembers his half-promise from the night before to make Steve breakfast. He gets up, leaving his phone, and knocks on the bathroom door.

“You want eggs?” he yells.

“What?”

“Eggs,” Bucky repeats.

“What?” Steve says again; Bucky hears the water stop.

“You want eggs? Yes, no, it’s fine if you say no, you’ve gotta eat something though—”

“I’d like eggs.”

“Great,” says Bucky, and stands there feeling a little stupid. “Scrambled, fried, over easy— I could make an omelette?” The silence drips. “If that’s okay,” he adds, feeling a lot stupid. He briefly considers melting into the floor.

“That’d be great, Buck,” Steve says through the door, and Bucky feels his shoulders relax.

Bucky walks all seventeen steps to the kitchen. He makes an omelette for Steve: cuts up bell peppers and onions, lets them sizzle in the nonstick till they’re sweating like a Gatorade commercial; adds some chopped-up ham; doesn’t wait too long before he cracks a couple eggs into the pan, and half-scrambles them. He watches the bright yellow liquid soften in colour, mellow a little, as it runs through the cracks and solidifies.

He’s got it on a plate and on the table before Steve walks in, a hand-towel around his broad shoulders catching the water from his hair. Apart from the black eye, he looks fine. Good, even. Well-rested and clean and comfortable— Bucky’s heart tugs once before he says, as deadpan as possible, “Good morning.”

“It’s five in the afternoon.”

“Oh, so now you’re worried about the time.”

Steve looks at him. “You—” he starts, and then shakes his head. “Those eggs look good.”

.

They catch up over eggs. Well. Steve is situated, technically speaking, with his mouth over the plate, and Bucky rushes around the kitchen trying to find something, anything, that he can give Steve. Coffee: not the best option, Steve’s sleep schedule is fucked enough already and Bucky doesn’t wanna make it worse; ancient cookies that wouldn’t be out of place in a museum: yeah, no thanks; salt shakers and repurposed spice jars and a dark green bottle of something he doesn’t remember buying called _Howard’s Very Own Charm-Breaker_ , upon which there is a small tag, running across the base, that reads, _curse-free gluten-free guilt-free!_. He makes a mental note to ask Nat about that one.

And Bucky throws questions over his shoulder— _Where did you go? Anything interesting happen? What made you wanna come back here?_ — like an endless string of scarves from the sleeve of a two-bit magician. He doesn’t ask about space, not this time. The questions are punctuated by the fork scraping over his least cracked plate, and Steve’s answers, mumbled around mouthfuls of food. Latin America, like he said yesterday. Few other places, too. He saw the Andes from the ground for the first time. Saw rivers slicing through land, villages crowded at their banks. He saw the sun rise and watched it fall, and watched a half-moon wane away till it was a sliver in the sky. The radio hums in the background with some old song just catchy enough to make Bucky nod a little, tap his foot as he scrubs the pan clean, no magic, just for something to do with his hands. Fields stretch in front of his mind’s eye, row upon row of maize shivering in the wind. He came here, Steve continues, because he needed space.

“You needed space,” Bucky repeats. A shit-eating grin that he’s powerless to stop crawls onto his face. “And so you came to one of the most densely populated cities on what you tell me is a tiny, tiny planet.”

“Size is relative,” Steve says. “When I’m this small, I mean. And—” There is a brief tightness to his mouth, but it passes. “There’s— it’s different now, back there.”

Bucky waits a moment. Steve doesn’t continue, and his shoulders are kind of hunched in, and his elbows are tilted out, and the fork sits awkwardly in his hand. Like he’s not used to this new body; like he’s trying to hide behind himself. Bucky moves on. “You do any other cool shit?”

Steve perks up. “Hell yeah.” And he starts telling Bucky about people he’s met: tour guides trying to sell him hexes and crap, a goat trying to eat his pants, his first time meeting a drag queen in Caracas. “I rode a motorbike,” Steve says offhandedly. Bucky pictures Steve on a Harley and, very casually, fumbles the pan and almost drops it.

The omelette is gone in a couple minutes, tops. Bucky tries and fails not to feel too pleased about that.

“Pop culture,” Steve says suddenly, in the midst of scraping the last strands of cheese from the plate.

“What about it?”

“You mentioned you’d catch me up on it.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, and points at the radio. It switches off, filling the kitchen with an easy silence. “Yeah, no— yeah. There’s some stuff in the living room.”

The chair legs whine in protest as they scrape across the floor. Bucky winces, but lets it go. He hesitates over the plate, wondering whether to wash it or not— fuck it, he decides, and casts a quick cleaning charm, lets it sit in the sink; he leads Steve down the hallway and turns him left, right, left again (Clint had sworn by the expanding sigils carved into the walls, but they’d just ended up making the place a maze), through strips of dusty sunlight and shadow, their socked feet slipping. He takes Steve into his room. He’s not got a whole lot of stuff, so he’s not too concerned about it being messy. The only thing that could fall under that category is the pile of textbooks threatening to avalanche over his desk.

“Your house is nice,” Steve comments, making a beeline for the bookshelf immediately.

“You can drop by whenever you want,” Bucky tells him. Bucky doesn’t tell him that this is what he wants Steve to do more than anything. He spreads his hands. “Mi casa, su casa.”

Steve runs a finger over the spines on the shelf. “That’s sweet.”

“It’s not sweet, you asshole, it’s practical—”

“You’re using usted with me,” Steve says, his face perfectly straight as he picks out _The Happy Prince_ and scans the back. “Woulda thought we were past that.”

“Yeah, well,” says Bucky, “I haven’t seen you in nine years.”

He regrets it the second it comes out of his mouth. 

“Apparently I need to respect my elders more.”

An expression somewhere between relief and _why am I friends with you_ lodges on Steve’s face.

“You wanna take care of that hand now?”

Steve pushes the book back in and settles down on the mattress, glancing briefly at Bucky’s phone, the lockscreen of which is lit up. Bucky hopes to God Natasha hasn’t sent anything weird. He glances around for something to use to fix up Steve’s hand, and then his eyes fall on the stack of candles Natasha gave him eighty million years ago. Perfect.

Steve may have changed, but his wrists are still fine-boned; strong, but thin enough that Bucky’s fingers can make an easy circle around them. He starts to wonder how much Steve has changed, if he’s used to it, but that’s a thought for another time. For now, he closes his eyes and grips the candle tight in his metal hand. His heartbeat is thundering soft in his ears. “Just hold still,” he instructs Steve. Steve stiffens even more. Bucky huffs out a laugh. “Relax.”

A buzzsaw drone in the back of his skull, the juncture between neck and spine. A low, insistent tug at his gut. And then it’s just him, and the fracture in Steve’s scaphoid, and the distance between them. “Relax,” he says again; Steve’s pulse, in Bucky’s ears, at the pads of his fingers, is fluttering. This kind of magic is a careful balance, a push-pull, and Steve’s pulling a bit too hard. “Breathe easy, okay?”

Slowly, Steve loosens; slowly, Bucky weans the white-hot pain from Steve’s wrist. He feels it slither through him, lingering and hesitant, but he doesn’t let it stop. He doesn’t take it on as his own. And slowly, achingly slowly, it crawls down the end of his metal arm. He pushes it into the candle, feels it crack. The afternoon light leaks in through the seams of his eyelids.

“Done,” he says, soft, and then clears his throat. Repeats himself. Forces his eyes open to find Steve’s glowing white and trained on him. “Uh. It should— it should be fine.”

Steve blinks and his eyes are back to their normal blue. “Thanks, Buck.” They’re warm, those eyes. So are the creases at their corners, and so is the crook at the corner of his mouth. So is his palm, tucked under Bucky’s thumb.

Bucky snatches his hand away, folds his arms on his lap. He feels awkward, suddenly. Too big for his skin. He looks down at the candle just so he doesn’t have to look at Steve head-on, expecting it to be cracked clean in half. There’s only a tiny fissure, though, that starts at the wick and trails off a little less than an eighth of the way down. “No problem,” he says.

.

Steve devours _The Happy Prince_ on Bucky’s couch. Bucky tries to get some studying done: SHIELD might be giving him a partial pity scholarship, but that doesn’t mean he’s got the smarts for it. He flips through textbooks as the sun falls alarmingly fast outside the window. The birds rise off their perches, part of the six o’clock rush to make it out of the tangle of buildings, windowsills, ledges, poles, into the open sky where they remain for one frozen, wild moment before flitting off to wherever they sleep.

Dinner is a late affair. There’s a fucking awesome shawarma place a couple blocks down from his apartment building; he takes Steve there, bundled in a too-big jacket that has a thermal charm woven into the seams, hands shoved in his pockets. Steve’s smiling, despite the cold. Bucky wants to kiss him, a little, but pushes it aside. They get pita wraps and too-large Cokes and traipse back over the cracked sidewalks to Bucky’s— they both like the indoors, and Steve’s yawning already. The Coke sloshes over the side into the bag, and the wraps promptly fall apart as soon as they try to eat them. But what they lack in structural integrity, they more than make up for in pretty much everything else; the hummus and pita alone make Bucky want to cry. They’re gonna watch Sharknado after dinner. Steve is going to sleep on a proper bed (fine, mattress); Bucky will take the couch. It’s all good.

“I might be leaving in the morning,” says Steve.

“You— oh,” says Bucky. “Uh, where?”

Steve glances up at him from across the kitchen table, then looks down again. There’s a bit of tahini at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t know yet.”

Something tightens in Bucky’s chest. “Like around the city?”

“Yeah,” says Steve. “Exploring, I guess.”

“Sure,” nods Bucky. It’s not the best, but still okay. “Cool. You sure you don’t want me to come with?”

“I think,” Steve starts. The tap drips. Bucky’s never really figured out how to light his kitchen properly— he’s tried a bunch of different bulbs, different brightnesses, and now he’s stuck with a murky, orange sort of light that softens everything, throws it more into shadow than anything else. Steve’s eyes are on a spot just above Bucky’s right shoulder. “I think I need to be alone,” Steve says at last.

“Okay then,” says Bucky, because what the fuck else can he say?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmKeqx5_vq8)


	7. a passing breeze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which steve is gone.

Bucky wakes up to an empty apartment. There’s no sound or movement, no open window, no note. There’s just him.

.

Eight o’clock and he’s forcing breakfast into his body because this is what he does now. He wakes up and showers and then eats breakfast. His stomach churns more than usual. It is cold outside. The chill seeps into his apartment: shitty central heating. He casts a quick warming charm into the seams of his shirt and waits.

.

Eight thirty, he texts Sam.

.

Eight fifty-three, he gets a reply, and a knock on his window.

“Hey, man,” says Sam, bobbing gently in the breeze. There is a spider on his outstretched hand that skitters onto Bucky’s windowsill— damn muffling charms, he’s going to have to reset them later— and shifts into Nat, who shakes out her red hair and nods at him. “You okay?”

“I think so,” Bucky says.

.

They stay with him a while longer. Bucky tries not to notice the way Sam’s looking at him, all gentle and concerned and grating against his skin. Nat is more normal; she rests her head against his knees and makes fun of his hair.

“So Steve left, huh,” Sam says eventually.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. His voice sounds normal. “He did. Don’t know if he’s coming back. He said he wanted space.”

Nat shifts around to look at him. “Isn’t he a star?”

“Yeah.”

“So—”

“Yeah, I know.”

She sighs, sort of.

.

12 o’clock: Bucky feels marginally better, but still mostly shit; at least he’s a piece of shit with nice friends who come over because they care about him. He tries not to feel pitied. He makes a not-pitied sandwich (cheese, tomato) and eats it.

.

1 o’clock, and Bucky goes looking for Steve.

And Bucky is desperate and defeated, so he takes the public bus.

It’s cold out, but warm and humid inside: Bucky’s hoodie is off, and pressed between his flesh arm and his chest. He’s gripping the handrail a little too tight, and there are marks on his arm where his jacket’s zipper gently bit at his skin earlier. Red marks. He stares at them and tries not to breathe too deep. It’s crowded, and every single person on this bus has armpits.

He goes to the library; to a hot-dog stand that is still, miraculously, on the same street corner, and exists in its own pocket of time; he goes to museums and other places of cultural importance. He hesitates outside a strip club, decides Steve’s too feminist for that sort of thing, realises Steve would go in there and give asshole guys a hard time and pay off the girls’ student loans or some shit; panics, goes in: there’s nothing there except glitter and sad old men, and a pinup poster that winks at him as he closes the door.

.

He walks.

He walks some more.

The light goes all soft and gold; the afternoon is waning away, slowly, carefully. He’s on 57th and 31st and 89th— the weird corner a couple blocks away from his apartment, the one where the fabric of space and time has bunched up uncomfortably and so three streets intersect instead of two— when he sees it: a shower of rain, some way down the sidewalk. It’s pouring there and clear everywhere else. Some unlucky bastard must have a weather hex, or be a small-time god, or it might be the strange nature of space there; either way, it’s beautiful. Glass drops, falling and falling, gleeful handfuls thrown down like so much rice. Like the light itself is coming down.

Something small, and tender, and green rises inside him; leaves reaching toward the light, even in the autumn.

Five o’clock: Bucky decides to go home and make brownies for dinner.

.

He realises halfway he doesn’t have the ingredients, so he goes to the grocery store.

It’s strange being under fluorescents, and in the warm; he has to take off his jacket again. The zipper tooth marks have faded.

He gets the ingredients. Gathers them and puts them into a wire cart that rattles.

.

Here’s what’s happening in Bucky’s head as he makes the brownies.

It hurts.

Of course it does. He’s gone, Steve is. This is where he used to be, in Bucky’s chest, the warm ache, the beating of his heart; he felt it again after so damn long, and now it isn’t there.

The black hole that used to be his heart isn’t there, either.

.

The dead are dead. They’re gone. Bucky used to think it was power to change that.

Now, though.

He has made a place where he talks to his friends and watches bad TV and watches the laundry spin, and sits, like a cat, in patches of sun; a place where he sleeps and reads and eats; a place he comes back to; a place for which he has bought goddamn __throw pillows__ , because they really tie the living room together. He made a home. He makes sure his friends are happy. HYDRA used him; he liked the dead because— God, being there, being with them, was seeing that hole dark and howling in his chest matched. Their rotting eyes and falling teeth were bound tight with that same fear of emptiness, of separation from the light and living, that lived inside him, that he carried with him, like a pebble stuck in a shoe. It was nice to know he could use it for something. It felt like control.

But it’s a tricky thing, staying in a wound: it makes you think nothing else matters.

He’s still learning to live with it every day.

There’s a question he used to keep on coming back to, with Sam— “Why me?”. Why him. Why, at age sixteen, did that black hole have to land in his heart. Who thought he could deal with it. He can’t. He thought he could, but he can’t.

 _ _But you can__ , Sam had said, __and you are__ , and Bucky had nearly cried.

It is harder to live than it is to die, and easier, and lonelier, and much less lonely. It’s confusing. He tries his best.

All these old hurts coming back up again. Bucky shoves on a pair of pink oven mitts so he doesn’t burn his hands later, and he waits.

He does these things, now. Now that his head’s back on his shoulders, now that there’s an arm back in its socket, now that he’s in a better, healthier place. He turns on the ceiling fan when the air gets too muggy. He closes the windows when it’s about to rain. He drinks enough water thanks to Nat, who got him a bottle a while ago that says __stay hydrated__ in glitter and will tap insistently at the side of his head until he is.

Bucky doesn’t do this to himself anymore, thinking of— of him and all the rest of it, all the could-have-beens, killing himself slowly with the guilt of it. He figures if he can get himself out of bed in the morning, he can damn well do anything; and Bucky will not let himself get bad again. He can do this. He __is__ doing it, every single day. Every time he washes his dishes and has a shower and latches and locks the apartment door before he sleeps, every time he buys vegetables and spends time with Nat and Sam and everyone else, every time he goes to school.

It’s the small things— a toothbrush holder, the fork he likes more than the others, stupid pink oven mitts— that remind him that he has come a long way from where he once was. That this is worth it. That Steve, whatever he may have once been, and that Bucky, whatever he may have once been, are memories in his head; and that Bucky now exists in a world where chicken-shaped egg-timers go off to remind him that there are brownies (brownies!) in the oven for his friends (his friends!), who are waiting outside for him. There is a world out there fit to burst with people he hasn’t met, most of whom he will never meet, but it is a world, nonetheless, outside of the black hole in his chest, the space left by a dying star. It reminds him that in the everyday, there are things worth living for, and living well.

So he takes the brownies out of the oven, and puts them out to cool a little. He sneaks one off the wire rack, and brings it to the balcony, where he sits, and eats, and drinks 300 ml of water, and stares at buildings coming alive with light as darkness falls.

.

The dead are gone.

So is Steve.

He doesn’t have to bring him back.

.

And Bucky knows this, and he’s— better with it, really, but he loves Steve. and when you love something, you let it go, but not before you tell it how much it means to you, how close you hold it to your heart, how glad you are you met it, and really, it’s fine if it leaves, if that’s what will make it happy, but it should know it has a place to stay if it wants to.

.

It hurts, goddamn it.

He will let Steve go.

.

Seven o’clock: he eats dinner with his friends. They ask where Steve is; he finds he is able to reply normally, thank God. The brownies are a hit.

Life is okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BENziAcChrA).
> 
> second-last chapter! almost there.


	8. a little lantern

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which steve comes home.

Autumn turns to winter.

A cold winter. It’s too cold to snow; the kind of cold that freezes landscapes still, crystallises the sky to brightest blue. The cars that move through the glass air seem strange and impossible things. Every branch is bare.

.

Time passes, but not much.

.

Bucky is back from Clint’s apartment, after watching that dumb show about the dog police that he won’t admit to maybe sort of liking. It’s warm: he got the heating fixed a couple days ago, after Nat came over and made him. There’s a batch of sugar cookies just out of the oven and on a plate in front of him. _Part Of Your World_ is playing, softly, from his phone. He leans over and switches it off.

.

Later— again, not much, about an hour— the doorbell rings.

This is unexpected, not least because Bucky’s doorbell hasn’t worked in years. It gets temperamental, especially when it’s cold out, and what with space-time issues with the door and everything else Bucky has long since given up on it.

So it takes him a second to work out what the noise is, and then he realises. He flips his laptop lid shut on Jake Peralta mid-sentence (thumbs up: “This guy!”) and swings his feet off the couch and slouches to the door, peeps through the peephole, and has the fastest, quietest heart attack, and recovery therefrom, known to man. He opens the door as far as the latch will let him. “Hey,” he says, a little breathless, but casual. Like his respiratory and nervous systems didn’t just fly out of his body and into the sun and then back. “What’s up.”

Steve’s face is very close. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s—”

(Bucky hesitates. Two seconds pass. They feel like centuries.)

“It’s okay.”

“It kind of isn’t.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky repeats. “People leave sometimes.”

“Yeah, I guess.” They stand there for a second, three inches and a door between them. Steve clears his throat. “So, um, you gonna let me in?”

“No,” Bucky says, and closes the door, and unlatches it, and opens it fully to see Steve’s face crumple and then smooth out.

.

It’s all a bit surreal.

Bucky still has sugar cookies, so he gives Steve a few. He doesn’t ask any questions for a while. Just looks at him, how he is, how he stands there, solid, awkward, strong; how small the cookies are, in his hands.

.

Steve doesn’t talk until two of them are gone. “I should have told you why I left,” he says. He doesn’t look at Bucky but at the kitchen counter.

It takes a while but Bucky answers. “You don’t have to,” he says, and finds that he means it.

“I want to,” Steve says.

Sunlight fills the room like air. Bucky can hear the wind outside whistling to come in, persistent at the windows. “Give me a second,” he says, and leaves the kitchen to close them tighter.

.

When he is back, Steve is sitting at the table. His hands twist into each other. Bucky hesitates, and then sits opposite.

“They used me too,” Steve says. His eyes flicker up then back down at his fingers. “Back home, I mean, and here. I was an experiment, and on probation. They wanted to see how long a star could stick it out down here.” He smiles, small and tired. “Long story short, you’ll be seeing more of us soon.”

“More?”

“They’re sending them down.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, and then: “Them.”

“Them. Not me. I stopped calling us _us_ a while ago.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not some goddamn test tube,” Steve says, and his hands, on the table, start to glow. The light spreads up his arms to his heart, his throat, his eyes. He burns low and angry, right in front of Bucky. “They used me. They don’t get to have me anymore.”

Bucky looks across the wide expanse of table, and wants to hold Steve’s glowing hand, and say, _they won’t_ , or _I won’t let them_ , or _me too_. Instead he says nothing. He sits there and wishes, and maybe this yearning silence is enough; maybe Steve can feel it, as he looks at Bucky.

“So will I be meeting the family any time soon?” Bucky tries feebly, just for something to say.

“Probably not,” Steve says. “My mother is dead.”

“Jesus,” Bucky says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.”

“When did it happen?”

“Sometimes it feels like yesterday,” Steve says. “Or last week. Last year. It gets— strange. I can’t remember sometimes. There are gaps.” His light starts to dim. “A few years ago, I think.”

And Steve’s light is all the way gone, he is all the way human, and he begins to cry at Bucky’s kitchen table.

.

This is not what Bucky expected.

.

Bucky goes over and holds him.

.

Steve is warm and solid and human and has his face pressed into Bucky’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says, over and over; “I’m sorry.” And Bucky says nothing but holds him closer and waits.

.

“I have gaps too,” he says eventually, when the outside light has waned to something less clear, something softer. A winter afternoon. He still holds Steve. It’s surprisingly not weird. He can feel Steve shift slightly, feels his nose pressing into his neck. “Used to have more of them. It’s better now.”

Silence. A word, quiet: “How?”

“I have friends,” Bucky says. “And a therapist. And I’ve had time to learn how to manage this.” He hesitates. “It took a long time. A really long fucking time. And I still have a long way to go.” He leans his head on Steve’s. “But I’m getting there.”

.

“Why did you leave?” Bucky asks after a while.

And this is when Steve lifts his head off Bucky’s shoulder and stares at him. “I was hurting you.”

“The fuck? When?”

“Didn’t you notice all the shit chasing you?”

And Bucky remembers shadows, tentacles, strange dreams of a desert under a night sky. A pen and a clipboard. His hand, signing. “That was because they thought they could use me.”

“Yeah, because I was there.”

Bucky, weirdly, feels like laughing. A strange half-relief half-exasperation fills him like helium. “No, you dumbass. Because of _me_. I summoned a star.”

Steve is frowning. “I thought you blamed me.”

“You—”

“I could feel it, you know.”

Silence.

 _What does that mean_ , Bucky wonders: did Steve hear him, all those times he wanted him there? Does he know? Is it possible that— that he—

His throat has stopped working.

That he wasn’t alone. That he was never alone. Or, more accurately, that somebody was listening; that someone was out there, and heard him.

“I did,” Bucky says. “I did, for a while, and then I stopped, because I could only blame you for so long.” Steve’s mouth is opening, and Bucky wants badly to change the direction this conversation is going. “Why did you have to go?” he asks, and finds he needs to hear the answer.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Steve says softly.

“You’re so dumb,” Bucky whispers, and buries his face into Steve’s shoulder.

“I know,” Steve says.

.

Time passes.

Eventually, Steve gets up and so does Bucky. Steve has a shower, and Bucky waits outside, and organises dinner for another time, and hopes Steve will actually make it this time. For now, he just orders Chinese and waits with _The Happy Prince_ on the couch for it to float in through the window.

He looks outside and watches a bird on a lamppost. It flies away, dark against the snow.

A knock on the wall. Bucky turns, and sees Steve, in pajamas that are too small for him. A strange thing happens: Bucky’s heart floats outside of him, tied on a string to his wrist. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Steve says.

He walks over and sits on the couch next to Bucky, looks at the book he’s got open on his lap. “What are you reading?” he says, and Bucky’s heart is beating fast and he touches Steve’s face— Steve’s eyes go wide, and then soften— and kisses him.

.

Later. Much later.

They lie on the couch, curled into each other, watching some home renovation show Bucky doesn’t know the name of, because all conscious thought left him smiling and bewildered hours ago.

“Are you staying?” he asks.

“What do you think?” Steve says.

Bucky pretends to consider it. “You know, historically speaking—“

“Oh, shut up.”

Bucky turns to face him, and grins like an idiot. He is ridiculously, wonderfully happy. “Make me.”

Steve does, with enthusiasm and feeling.

Bucky pushes away after a while, reluctantly. “Hey. I was talking to you, you know.”

“Sorry,” Steve says, and does not look it one bit.

“I’m only asking because Sam and Nat and Clint want to meet you.”

“And I wanna meet them.”

“Good,” Bucky says. “Is tomorrow good?”

Steve’s eyes go wide and he pauses the show. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” says Bucky, and smiles.

.

Bucky dreams of space that night, of darkness and of stars. He dreams of light. And he dreams of Steve, next to him, and hopeful; a hand, reaching out across the gulfs between galaxies. _Come with me_ , says Steve.

And Bucky knows somewhere that this is how it will end, someday: they have found each other again and again and they will grow old and then Bucky will join Steve, up here, with the stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3lKS2XXlng)
> 
> if you've read this far, thank you. i hope you liked this.
> 
> kudos and comments would absolutely make my day, if you'd like to give them. i'd love to hear your thoughts about this story, good or bad or anything in between, and i welcome (and encourage!!) criticism.
> 
> you can also find me [here.](https://transitory-yes.tumblr.com)
> 
> thank you <3


End file.
